Cyber-Physical Instrument for Real-time Hybrid Structural Testing (MRI)

High-fidelity performance validation is critical for the acceptance of new structural monitoring and control systems. However, testing of numerous possible scenarios of such systems is not always feasible due to the expense and time involved. Real-time hybrid (RTH) testing techniques use a testing procedure where known structural components are represented with computational models, and specimens of elements that are not well understood are physically tested. These methods provide the opportunity to test numerous configurations with a single experiment. This project focuses on the development of an instrument to integrate physical and simulated components of a RTH test. The goal is to integrate these under a common reusable middleware architecture for flexible and reconfigurable use. This instrument will be available in the Bowen Laboratory.

Graduate Students: Xiuyu Gao, Nestor Castaneda, Ge (Gaby) Ou

Undergraduate Students: Chris Beeler, Jian

Large-Scale Real-Time Hybrid Simulation for Validation of Advanced Damping Systems

Magnetorheological damper is a type of advanced damping system that can reduce the impact of earthquakes on structures. This video demonstrates the project that applies magnetorheological damper in large scale. Real-time Hybrid Simulation and Over-Driven Clipped Optimal Control are used in this project, and their performances are validated through experiments.

Graduate Students: Tony Friedman, Ali Irmak Ozdagli, Tong Li

 

CyberMech - a Novel Run-time Substrate for Cyber Mechanical Systems

The core objective of this collaborative research is to develop a novel run-time substrate, CyberMech, to enhance the performance of real-time cyber-mechanical experiments through an integrated set of advances in (1) cyber-physical co-design of how control and simulation computations are decomposed for real-time parallel executions; (2) configurable and adaptive platform concurrency and communication mechanisms to deal with physical and computational timing constraints; (3) design, conduct, and evaluation of representative real-time hybrid experiment that demonstrate the tight integration of timing, sequencing, and value semantics across cyber and physical domains. The CyberMech substrate will be directly applicable to the highly multidisciplinary field of earthquake engineering which includes researchers and professional engineers, social scientists, emergency responders, hazard management personnel, and public policy makers.

Grant: NSF-1136075
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Collaborative Institutes: Purdue University and Washington University in St. Louis
Faculty Investigators: Dr. Shirley Dyke (Purdue University), Dr. Arun Prakash (Purdue University), Dr. Chris Gill (Washington University), Dr. Chenyang Lu (Washington University), Dr. Kunal Agrawal (Washington University)
Graduate Students: Amin Maghareh (Purdue University), Gregory Bunting (Purdue University), Payton Lindsay (Purdue University), Jordan Krage (Washington University), David Ferry (Washington University)