2nd EFAST Workshop, Reliable Testing of Seismic Performance
The EFAST project consisted of a design study of a new major seismic testing facility in Europe that will be comparable with important testing installations that are now working or under construction in Japan, U.S.A., China and Taiwan. The presentations by invited experts during the 2nd EFAST Workshop, which was held by the end of the project, emphasized the basic idea that experiments are necessary because reliable engineering cannot still rely only on numerical predictions. The relation between the experimental research and the improvements of the buildings codes in the last decades has also suggested that a consistent experimental activity is fundamental for properly understanding and predicting the real behaviour of complex structural elements. Today in many fields, as in the assessment of nuclear facilities for example, more reliability is required in order to increase the safety, which leads to a newer impulse for experimental testing of components, subsystems, soil-structure interaction effects and so on. The necessity and characteristics of the available testing methods was reviewed with up-to-date examples and studies on aspects such as shaking table, pseudo-dynamic and hybrid testing methods, centrifuge facilities, scale models, soil-structure interaction, control strategies and performance.
Within the EFAST design study as it was presented, several solutions are proposed for the future experimental facility, among which the reference one is a laboratory composed, mainly, of a high performance shaking table array and a reaction structure where both traditional (pseudo-static/dynamic) and innovative testing techniques (e.g. real time hybrid testing) can be applied and combined. These shaking tables can be moved in the trench and can be also rigidly coupled between them, if necessary. A large SDOF shaking table for geotechnical studies is also foreseen in such solution. The discussion of the different solutions covered aspects such as costs (including safety, maintenance and operation), demand of experiments, flexibility and performance among others.
MARAZZI Francesco;
MOLINA RUIZ Francisco Javier;
2011-11-23
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC66914
978-92-79-21842-2,
1831-9424,
EUR 25012 EN,
OP LB-NA-25012-EN-N,
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC66914,
10.2788/92453,
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