Substructuring technique is a method that an original structural model is divided into two parts; experimental and numerical substructures, and then its dynamic characteristic is replicated with only experimental substructure which is manufactured as a physical model and is tested. This paper proposes a shaking table testing method based on the substructuring technique and discuss its experimental verification. By applying the substructuring technique to an original structural model, it is decomposed into two parts; an upper experimental substructure with multi degrees-of-freedom and an lower numerical substructure. At the moment, interface force becomes to act between their interfaces due to artificial dividing into two parts. In this paper, numerical substructure corresponding to the lower part with single or multi degrees-of-freedom of the original multi degrees-of-freedom is incorporated in control computer of shaking table, to produce the interface acceleration by inputting the interface force which is experimentally measured from the upper experimental substructure. Finally, shaking table is used for exciting the upper experimental substructure with the motion of the interface acceleration. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed method that an experiment can be implemented by feedback of the interface acceleration.

In this study, We have evaluated the applicability of the substructuring technique to reducing the computational cost of a three-dimensional analysis of a vehicle-track structure dynamic interaction. When the substructuring technique is applied properly to the three-dimensional dynamic interaction analysis, computational cost can be greatly cut down without loss in accuracy.