Estimation of the displacement time history of high-rise building structures using limited measurement data and structural information

Abstract

A method is proposed to estimate the seismic displacement time history of a high-rise building structure. The structure is simplified to a flexural-shear mass-spring model, and the optimal parameter values of the model are determined using particle swarm optimization. Limited measured acceleration and roof residual displacement data are used to calculate the model error in the optimization process. In this method, only the number of stories and the heights of each story are needed as known structural information. The displacement time history calculated for the optimal model is treated as the estimation of the actual response of the original structure. The responses of a 13-story reinforced-concrete frame-shear wall structure obtained from numerical simulation of the ABAQUS model are used to verify the performance of the method. The results show that the average estimation error of the maximum story displacement is 5.2% and that of the maximum inter-story drift ratio is 5.3%. Having the acceleration responses of 1/3–1/4 stories is sufficient to accurately estimate the story displacement and inter-story drift ratio if the root mean square noise-to-signal ratio of the acceleration is less than 30%. The shaking table test data of a 15-story reinforced-concrete shear structure are used to verify the method’s effectiveness; the average estimation error of the maximum story displacements of the 7th, 8th, and 15th stories is found to be 4.8%.