Application of Story-Wise Shear Building Identification Method to Actual Ambient Vibration

A sophisticated and smart story stiffness system identification (SI) method for a shear building model is applied to a full-scale building frame subjected to micro-tremors. The advantageous and novel feature is that not only the modal parameters, such as natural frequencies and damping ratios but also the physical model parameters, such as story stiffnesses and damping coefficients, can be identified using micro-tremors. While the building responses to earthquake ground motions are necessary in the previous SI method, it is shown in this paper that the micro-tremor measurements in a full-scale five-story building frame can be used for identification within the same framework. The SI using micro-tremor measurements leads to the enhanced usability of the previously proposed story-wise shear building identification method. The degree of auto-regressive eXogenous models and the cut-off frequencies of band-pass filter are determined to derive reliable results

Uncertainties in long-period ground motion and its impact on building structural design: Case study of the 2011 Tohoku (Japan) earthquake

On March 11, 2011, Japan was shaken by the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku earthquake (the Great East Japan Earthquake). This paper reports some aspects of this earthquake related to long-period ground motions and its impact on building structural design. It was reported that long-period ground motions were induced extensively in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. The response of high-rise buildings to the recorded ground motions during this earthquake and the simulated ground motions provided by the Japanese Government is discussed from the viewpoint of resonance and critical excitation. The main topics of this paper are (i) the investigations on uncertainties in long-period ground motions (uncertainty in predominant frequency, duration and amplitude) and (ii) its impact on structural design of super high-rise buildings. It is shown finally that the earthquake input energy and its bound analysis lead to clearer understanding of the effect of long-period ground motion on building structural design

Critical Double Impulse Input and Bound of Earthquake Input Energy to Building Structure

A theory of earthquake input energy to building structures under single impulse is useful for disclosing the property of energy transfer function. This property shows that the area of the energy transfer function is constant irrespective of natural period and damping of building structures. However, single impulse may be unrealistic from a certain viewpoint because the frequency characteristic of input cannot be expressed by this input. In order to resolve such issue, a double impulse is introduced in this paper. The frequency characteristic of the Fourier amplitude of the double impulse is found in an explicit manner and a critical excitation problem is formulated with an interval of two impulses as a variable. The solution to that critical excitation problem is derived. An upper bound of the earthquake input energy is then derived by taking full advantage of the property of the energy transfer function that the area of the energy transfer function is constant. The relation of the double impulse to the corresponding one-cycle sinusoidal wave as a representative of near-fault pulse-type waves is also investigated

A spectrum-driven damage identification by minimum constitutive relation error and sparse regularization

This paper proposes a novel model-based damage identification strategy based on minimum constitutive relation error and sparse regularization using the power spectrum density data. Firstly, the stationary random vibration problem is transformed into a series of harmonic vibrations by the pseudo excitation method and the error in constitutive relation is established by the admissible stress field and admissible displacement field. A much more general and simpler strategy so as to build the admissible stress field is addressed by requiring only an extra decomposition of the stiffness matrix. Then, the sparse regularization is added to the original constitutive relation error objective function to circumvent the ill-posedness of the inverse problem. Finally, the solution of this nonlinear optimization problem is solved by the alternating minimization method. The proposed method has the advantage that only measurement power spectrum density data from few limited sensors are needed in the inverse analysis. Numerical and experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of this approach

Stiffness and damping identification for asymmetric building frame with in-plane flexible floors

In most building structures, floors with sufficient in-plane stiffness exist and an assumption of rigid in-plane stiffness is valid. However, in some building structures, an assumption of rigid in-plane stiffness does not hold. A method of system identification (SI) for physical parameters (stiffness, damping) is proposed for three-dimensional (3D) building structures with in-plane flexible floors. The stiffness and damping parameters of each vertical structural frame in the 3D building structure are identified from the measured floor horizontal accelerations together with the stiffness and damping parameters of each floor. It is shown that a batch processing least-squares estimation method for many discrete time-domain measured data enables the direct identification of both the stiffness and damping parameters of each vertical structural frame and the stiffness and damping parameters of each floor. The proposed method possesses an advantage that all stiffness and damping parameters of vertical frames and horizontal frames (floors) can be identified simultaneously without search iteration. The accuracy and reliability of the proposed method are made clear by numerical simulations for measured data without noise and measured data with noise. A method of noise elimination is proposed to enhance the identification accuracy. Finally, experiments using a shaking table are conducted for the accuracy investigation of the proposed identification method. It is confirmed that the proposed identification method possesses a reliable ability to identify the stiffness and damping parameters for 3D building structures with in-plane flexible floors

Vision-Based Building Seismic Displacement Measurement by Stratification of Projective Rectification Using Lines

We propose a new flexible technique for accurate vision-based seismic displacement measurement of building structures via a single non-stationary camera with any perspective view. No a priori information about the camera’s parameters or only partial knowledge of the internal camera parameters is required, and geometric constraints in the world coordinate system are employed for projective rectification in this research. Whereas most projective rectifications are conducted by specifying the positions of four or more fixed reference points, our method adopts a stratified approach to partially determine the projective transformation from line-based geometric relationships on the world plane. Since line features are natural and plentiful in a man-made architectural building environment, robust estimation techniques for automatic projective/affine distortion removal can be applied in a more practical way. Both simulations and real-recorded data were used to verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. We hope that the proposed method could advance the consumer-grade camera system for vision-based structural measurement one more step, from laboratory environments to real-world structural health monitoring systems