An attempt of real-time structural response assessment by an interferometric approach: A tailor-made earthquake early warning for buildings

Abstract

Earthquake early warning systems (EEWS) are considered an effective and viable tool for seismic risk reduction in cities. Innovative directions for the development of novel EEWS include designing new methods for structure specific EEWS, where regional and on-site networks of seismic stations and seismological and earthquake-engineering knowledge and experience are combined. Furthermore, the design of novel EEWS can nowadays take advantage of recent technological advances involving the development of low-cost networks of wireless accelerometric stations. In this work we present a first attempt at designing a structure specific EEW procedure, which is based on the analysis of early P-wave signals recorded by wireless accelerometers placed at different levels of a structure. The procedure exploits the interferometric analysis of the recorded P-wave signals to obtain the response of the structure with respect to an impulsive input signal. This latter piece of information can be combined with an estimation of the incoming event size in order to obtain a real-time early assessment of the structural response at the different structure's levels. The procedure, named Tailor-made Earthquake Early Warning (TEEW), is composed of four steps: (1) The early event characterization through the inversion of the accelerometer spectra recorded at the base of the structure, (2) the early building response estimation through the deconvolution of P-wave signals recorded at selected levels of the structure, (3) the estimation of the expected shaking at the different levels through the convolution of the results from steps (1) and (2), and (4) a simple decisional rule based on the exceedance of a threshold value of the early estimation of the inter-story drift (i.e. the relative horizontal displacement of two adjacent floors in a building, expressed as a percentage of the story height separating the two adjacent floors) to determine whether or not to issue an alarm.A first test of the TEEW procedure is presented using recordings of three aftershocks of the L'Aquila sequence in 2009 that have been collected at the city hall of Navelli, Italy.