A note on predetermined earthquake damage scenarios for structural health monitoring

Abstract

It is shown that the damage scenarios for site-specific building models, responding in highly nonlinear manner to strong earthquake ground-motion pulses, can be used in real-time health-monitoring systems. When it can be shown that such predictions produce robust results and are not sensitive to the details of the complete time history of strong ground motion, the predetermined earthquake damage scenarios (PEDS) method can produce reliable predictions of the location(s) and the degree(s) of structural damage in essentially real time. It is shown that for a full-scale building, damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California, PEDS based on one-dimensional wave propagation in the layered building model would have produced accurate and realistic predictions of damage. In contrast to the vibrational health-monitoring methods that track changes in the frequency and stiffness of the characteristic functions, PEDS methods provide invaluable information for spatial and temporal identification of damage. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.