NHERI@UC San Diego Upgraded 6-DOF Large High-Performance Outdoor Shake Table Facility

Webinar Overview

Since its commissioning in 2004, the UC San Diego Large High-Performance Outdoor Shake Table (LHPOST) has enabled the seismic testing of large structural, geostructural and soil-foundation-structural systems, with its ability to accurately reproduce far- and near-field ground motions. In its 15 years of operation (2004-2019) as a 1-DOF shake table, 34 landmark projects were conducted on the LHPOST as a national shared-use NEES and then NHERI experimental facility funded by the US National Science Foundation.

The tallest structures ever tested worldwide on a shake table were tested using the LHPOST/LHPOST6, which has no roof overhead and is, therefore, free from height and crane capacity restrictions. Experiments conducted on the LHPOST have generated essential knowledge that has greatly advanced seismic design practice and response predictive capabilities for structural, geostructural, and nonstructural systems. However, the limitation of the LHPOST to unidirectional (1-DOF) input motion prevented the investigation of important aspects of the actual seismic response of 3-D civil infrastructure systems to realistic multi-directional seismic input excitation. The LHPOST was originally designed as a 6-DOF shake table but built as a 1-DOF system to meet the funding available at the time. With a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) along with additional financial resources from UC San Diego, the LHPOST was recently (2019-2022) upgraded to its full 6-DOF capabilities and renamed the LHPOST6.

This presentation will provide an overview of the LHPOST under its initial 1-DOF capability and of past landmark projects. It will describe the upgrade to six degrees of freedom and the performance characteristics of the LHPOST6. New seismic research and testing opportunities offered by the LHPOST6 will be discussed.

Presenter

Joel Conte is Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he currently holds the Eric and Johanna Reissner Chair in Applied Mechanics and Structural Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering. His primary research interests are in structural modeling & analysis, structural dynamics and earthquake engineering, random vibrations, structural reliability and risk analysis, probabilistic performance-based analysis & design of structures, shake table dynamics and control, experimental-analytical correlation studies, structural identification and health monitoring.

Dr. Conte was a member of the design team for the Large High-Performance Outdoor Shake Table (LHPOST) facility at UC San Diego, which was developed as part of the NSF George E. Brown Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), was Principal Investigator of the NSF funded project to upgrade the LHPOST to six degrees of freedom (in 2018-2022), and is currently Director of the UC San Diego Englekirk Structural Engineering Center which includes the NSF Natural Hazard Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) LHPOST6 shake table experimental facility.