Vibration-based monitoring of tall buildings

Abstract

Tall buildings are indispensable solutions in cities where economy and population grow rapidly. Parallel to advancements in technology, number of tall buildings in regions with high seismicity increased dramatically in recent years. On the other hand, it is crucial to conduct condition assessment of such structures after an earthquake due to public safety and owner- need reasons. Structural Health Monitoring systems enable condition assessment of structures before, during and after earthquake rapidly, remotely and objectively. Structural Health Monitoring systems are mandatory to be installed on tall buildings in Turkey since 2019 because of their significant contribution to our understanding of dynamic behavior of tall buildings and our capability of condition monitoring. However, limited number of sensors are instrumented for tall buildings due to economic reasons. With the motivations and reasons mentioned above, three unique methodologies on development and updating of simplified models of tall buildings based on system identification results are presented. These methodologies are able to estimate responses of non-instrumented floors from instrumented floors; therefore, condition assessment of tall buildings after an earthquake can be precisely performed by computing inter-story drift ratios and tracking changes in modal parameters. In addition, proposed methodologies are validated with recorded responses of real structures under different earthquakes. Lastly, in-house developed software platform for real - time monitoring of tall buildings is presented.