ABSTRACT
In these years, major research projects on building structures have been carried out using the E-Defense shake table facility, the world’s largest earthquake simulator in Miki, Japan. E-Defense can shake a large specimen having a completely three-dimensional configuration. However, since the cost of such a specimen can be very high, testing a part of the specimen such as the plane frame of a building would be much more economical and would still yield meaningful data. Such test methods would also enable parametric studies requiring multiple specimens. Accordingly, the authors are currently constructing a so-called “test bed” having a multipurpose inertial mass system (Takeuchi, Kasai, et al. 2007, 2008). This test bed will be utilized for the aforementioned study on innovative methods, involving researchers from both the US and Japan, as part of the NEES/E-Defense Collaboration Research Program.
