Real time dynamic substructuring tests on a cable-deck system in absence of delay

The cable available at the Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory (EERL) of the University of Bristol is a single wire steel cable with diameter 0.78 ·10−3m and length 5.4m, inclined at an angle θ = 22.6◦. It has been designed to reproduce the behaviour of a real cable in a cable-stayed bridge. In accordance with this purpose, 21 lead masses have been attached, spaced at 0.25m, except the one on the top and the one on the bottom that distance 0.20m by the ends of the cable. The cable interacts with the numerical model of the deck through a vertical actuator.

The numerical model has been written in Matlab/Simulink and has been
implemented on a dSpace DS1104 RD Controller board. Then the dSpace module ControlDesk has been used for the online analysis and control.
The cable has been previously tested without substructuring. Hence, the
effective displacements acquired by the LVDT set at the bottom of the cable have been compared with the displacements of the attached middle and quarter tracks, recorded by the Video Gauge System.