Stability Prediction for Real-Time Hybrid Simulation with Different Physical and Numerical Substructure Discretization Using Asynchronous Multirate Simulation

Abstract

Real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) is an emerging high-efficiency and low-cost structural test method. Stability analysis is a very important part of RTHS to ensure the stability of the experimental system. Currently, there are two different types of analysis methods: discrete and continuous methods. However, these two methods obtain different stability results when the time step of the numerical substructure (NS) is large. To investigate this difference, a stability analysis strategy based on asynchronous multi-rate hybrid simulation is proposed. These two different types of stability analysis methods were introduced and the fact that the two methods may get different stability results was discussed. The proposed strategy verified that, compared with the continuous method, the discrete method is more suitable for the stability analysis of RTHS. Due to the limitation of the discrete method, it is not suitable to take the critical stability points obtained by the discrete method directly as the whole stability boundary of RTHS when the time step of the NS is large. The proposed strategy can handle cases in which the time step of the NS is large to obtain a more accurate stability result.