Advanced Seismic Experiments Using SCRAMNet: An Example on The Cyclic Test of A Coupled-SPSW Substructure

A reduced-scale substructure of coupled steel plate shear wall (SPSW) was tested on the multi-axial testing system (MATS) in NCREE. Based on the seismic design requirements of the prototype SPSW, the overturning moments were required to be applied proportional to the lateral shear. A Shared Common Random Access Memory Network (SCRAMNet) was utilized to perform the essential communication between the xPC target and the MATS controller. The control algorithms and the trigger of the data acquisition were built into a Simulink based model and downloaded to the xPC target before communicating with the MATS controller. Experimental results confirmed that the proposed control model successfully applied the required loading histories onto the specimen with the desirable data collection instances. It is concluded that this technique can be expended to a more general structural experiment control framework in the future.