Long‐term building safety assessment from a series of earthquake excitations

Abstract

AbstractStructural health monitoring is conducted to ensure the structural integrity of a building during earthquakes. This study aimed to improve our understanding of the dynamic response of buildings subjected to a series of earthquake excitations, focusing on interpreting structural dynamic characteristics and identifying potential seismic damage subjected to a series of earthquake excitations. To this end, a series of seismic response data of a 13‐story reinforced‐concrete/steel building were collected through long‐term monitoring over 2 years. A systematic approach for monitoring the health of the building was established by integrating several algorithms for vibration‐based (both output‐only and input–output parametric nonparametric feature‐discrimination algorithms) and model‐based feature extraction techniques. Furthermore, the time‐varying dynamic characteristics of the building were determined, including its modal frequency, mode shape, and stiffness, as extracted from features obtained over the monitoring period of 2 years. Safety assessment of this newly compound high‐rise building is investigated to explore the system dynamic characteristics through long‐term seismic monitoring.