ABSTRACT
Experiment plays an important role in civil engineering research. Model testing can be applied to study the behavior of the prototype under different loading or to verify the analysis results from different numerical methods. However, it’s very difficult and complex to perform the experiment based performance prediction of long span bridges subjected to earthquake loading. The space and payload limitation of the shake table and the severe similitude requirements for seismic experiments significantly increase the research difficulty. One of the first shake-table testing of a reduced scale model of long span bridge was carried out by Godden and Aslam (1978). The Ruck-A-Chucky cable-stayed bridge was structurally scaled to 1:200 and tested on the shake table of the Earthquake Simulation Laboratory of the University of California Berkeley. Garevski et al. (1991) conducted a shake table test of the Jindo
Bridge, a cable-stayed bridge with a main span of 344 m, at the University of Bristol. In order to fit the size of the shake table, the geometrical scale was set to 1:150. A 1:60 suspension bridge model was constructed and tested on shake table by Wang et al. (2006). However, the aforementioned tests were all performed on single shake table, none of them could take into account the non-uniform excitation cases.
