Seismic Monitoring of Structures and New Developments

Abstract

Presented in this paper is an overview of the seismic monitoring issues as practiced in the past, as well as current applications and new developments to meet the needs of the engineering and user community. A number of examples exhibit the most recent applications that can be used for verification of design (including performance based design) and construction practices, real-time applications for assessing the functionality, damage condition of built environment and understanding the behavior of a particular building during strong and low-amplitude excitations. In addition and in particular, recent developments and approaches to obtain displacements and, in turn, drift ratios, in real-time or near real-time that are related to damage condition and therefore functionality of a structure are introduced. Development of wireless sensors that are now finding limited but growing applications in projects that require long-term monitoring are discussed with an example. Other special instrumentation arrays that include additional sensors to study soil-structure interaction and wave propagation are described with available recorded data.