A Pseudodynamic Testing System Based On MTS-LabVIEW

Structural seismic testing is an important method which is founded on the progress and development of computer technology to assess reliability of structural seismic design.It has also been pushed forward by the innovation of seismic design of structures at the same time.The virtual instrument system can be established through Lab VIEW program with only a little extra hardware added to a personal computer,and it has powerful function and low cost contrast to traditional instrument.The difficulty and complexity of software design has been reduced by graphic programing method of Lab VIEW language which is suitable to implement structural pseudodynamic testing.The substructure pseudodynamic testing system is set up based on Lab VIEW program and MTS loading system,and main contents of this paper are summarized as follows.Firstly,the equivalent force control method is applied and validated in a substructure pseudodynamic test of double shear wall coupling beam damper by MTS test system.Secondly,the signal communication between Lab VIEW main program which includes Lab VIEW data transform subprogram and MTS sysytem is achieved by a personal computer equipped with the PCI-1712 acquisition card of Advantech company.Thirdly,the main pseudodynamic testing program controling the MTS loading system is achieved by including the numerical integration of central difference method and PID controller with its parameters tuned by Lab VIEW subprogram.Eventually,a three story steel frame equipped with a tuned liquid damper is divided into numerical substructure and test substructure.The pseudodynamic test system based on MTS-Lab VIEW is verified by the shaking table real-time substructure test subject to earthquake excitation.