Development of space-saving mechanism in shaking table systems for earthquake simulators

This paper presents a development of shaking table mechanism, where the purpose is to generate vibrations in multiple directions in a space-saving manner as compared to the conventional shaking table mechanism. Since the proposed shaking table mechanism sets up each actuator in horizontal excitation direction on the side of the table, the movement of table requires the coordinated control of each actuator. In the proposed shaking table system, therefore, the references for each actuator are generated on the basis of the target table motion and geometric arrangement. In addition, zero phase error tracking algorithm as a feedforward compensator is applied to completely synchronize the motion of all actuators. The effectiveness of proposed shaking table mechanism and control system has been verified by numerical simulations using a horizontal shaken laboratory prototype.