Shear building stiffness estimation by wave traveling time analysis

Abstract

SummaryA novel damage identification technique to estimate stiffness in a multistory building supported on solid ground is presented. Based on a shear building model, a 1-dimensional wave equation for a vertically propagating shear wave is derived. A Ricker pulse is used as excitation signal and propagated through the building. Wave propagation in the building is based on the Thomson-Haskell method, where each story is represented as a single layer in a multiple stratum model. The wave arrival times of the pulse at each story are used to calculate the stiffness of the columns. The involved calculations in this method grow only linearly with the number of stories, as opposed to other identification methods, as modal analysis, that grow geometrically; this makes this approach an interesting alternative method to asses building integrity. Simulation result for a building with heterogeneous characteristics across the stories confirms the feasibility of the proposal.

Structural health monitoring of a 32‐storey steel‐frame building using 50 years of seismic monitoring data

“…The wave method , introduced in the late 1990s, is based on the view of the structural response as a superposition of propagating waves through the structure as a whole, bouncing back and forth after reflections from its boundaries 35–46 . Since impulse response functions (IRFs) and seismic interferometry were proposed to study waves travelling vertically through the structure 40 the interest in the method has been increasing 47–52 . We chose this method for our study because of its robustness, sensitivity, precision, and ability to identify directly the distribution of structural stiffness along the height, at resolution as afforded by the number of instrumented levels.…”