Substructure testing for dynamic soil-structure interaction

Testing for soil-pile interaction during an earthquake is often performed on a shaking table with the pile embedded in soil in a laminar shear box. As it is not feasible to construct large-scale structures supported by the piles for testing, the structure is usually modelled as a cantilevered mass which gives a very specific and simplistic response. This can be useful in understanding soil-structure interaction, but is not a realistic representation of true conditions. This paper presents a pilot study into the use of substructure testing which uses rapid structural computation and actuators to apply the response of a complex structure to a pile in real-time during seismic testing.