Design of shaking table tests on atrium-style subway station models under seismic excitations

In view of the good performance in natural lighting, more and more atrium-style subway stations are used in urban subway systems. Some characteristics of such stations are ex-tremely different from traditional frame subway stations, such as no columns in waiting hall floor and a lot of beams instead of ceiling slab and middle slab. These discontinuous components in the axial direction of the subway lines may lead to special lateral defor-mation while experiencing an earthquake. Shaking table tests are essential to acquire the seismic aspects about atrium-style subway station. This study introduces the design scheme for soil-atrium-style subway station model and verification for free-field model. The in-situ soil is modeled using artificial soil, which is a mixture of sawdust and sand with a mass ratio of sawdust to sand 1:2.5. For the subway station structure, galvanized steel wire and micro concrete were used to model the prototypical reinforcement and con-crete. A flexible-wall container, whose diameter and height were 3 m and 1.6 m, respec-tively, was adopted in the test. The results of free-field test showed that the flexible-wall container presented a shear-type deformation mode under dynamic excitation. The test data proved to be reliable and useful to valid-ate the test scheme of soil-structure model.