Assessment of environmental and nondestructive earthquake effects on modal parameters of an office building based on long-term vibration measurements

Abstract

Identification for the modal parameters of an instrumented office building using ambient vibration measurements is conducted in this study based on a recently developed stochastic subspace identification methodology equipped with an alternative stabilization diagram and a hierarchical sifting process. The identified results are then deliberately examined to recognize the dynamic features for quite a few dominant modes of this building structure including three pairs of closely-spaced modes. Making use of the collected three-month data including three seismic events, the analyzed results show that the root-mean-square vibration response is directly related to the wind speed and indirectly related to the air temperature under a specific condition. More importantly, it is discovered that the root-mean-square response is the dominant factor to induce the variation of modal parameters. Except for the torsional modes, all the other modal frequencies are highly correlated with the root-mean-square acceleration in a negative manner and the corresponding damping ratios also clearly display a positive correlation. Another crucial observation from this assessment is that the percentages of frequency variation in three months for most of the identified modes go beyond 10%. The effects of three nondestructive earthquakes are further traced to observe the tendencies of reducing the modal frequencies and raising the damping ratios, both with a variation level possibly increasing with the seismic intensity. But different from the effects of environmental factors, the changes in modal parameters caused by nondestructive earthquakes will vanish right after the seismic events.