Monitoring the dynamic characteristics of tall buildings by GPS technique

Abstract

Dynamic characteristics of large structures, such as tall buildings, longspan suspension, cable-stayed bridges and tall chimneys, are key to assess their drift and stress conditions. The dynamic characteristics of large structures are difficult to measure directly under the condition of earthquakes or strong winds using traditional techniques such as laser collimator, total station and accelerometers. Therefore there is a great need for developing new method or technique for this purpose. Recent advances in Global Positioning System (GPS) technology provide a great opportunity to monitor long-period changes of structures reliably. GPS receivers capable to gauge the motion at the centimeter or sub-centimeter level with sampling frequency 10Hz or even 20 Hz are now available from several manufacturers. To the authors’ knowledge, the capability of identifying dynamic characteristics from GPS observations has not been widely verified. For the feasibility study on using kinematic GPS technology to identify the dynamic characteristics of tall buildings, some experiments were conducted in a simulative environment. This paper discusses in detail the experiment device, and the ways through them GPS data are recorded, processed and analyzed. With post-processing version of NovAtel’s Softsurv software and auto-regressive (AR) spectral analysis method, relative displacements and corresponding vibrating frequencies have been derived from GPS observations. The results indicate that the dynamic characteristics can be identified accurately by kinematic GPS technology.