Abstract
Suffering from structural deterioration and natural disasters, the resilience of civil structures in the face of extreme loadings inevitably drops, which may lead to catastrophic structural failure and presents great threats to public safety. Earthquake-induced extreme loading is one of the major reasons behind the structural failure of buildings. However, many buildings in earthquake-prone areas of China lack safety monitoring, and prevalent structural health monitoring systems are generally very expensive and complicated for extensive applications. To facilitate cost-effective building-safety monitoring, this study investigates a method using cost-effective MEMS accelerometers for buildings’ rapid after-earthquake assessment. First, a parameter analysis of a cost-effective MEMS sensor is conducted to confirm its suitability for building-safety monitoring. Second, different from the existing investigations that tend to use a simplified building model or small-scaled frame structure excited by strong motions in laboratories, this study selects an in-service public building located in a typical earthquake-prone area after an analysis of earthquake risk in China. The building is instrumented with the selected cost-effective MEMS accelerometers, characterized by a low noise level and the capability to capture low-frequency small-amplitude dynamic responses. Furthermore, a rapid after-earthquake assessment scheme is proposed, which systematically includes fast missing data reconstruction, displacement response estimation based on an acceleration response integral, and safety assessment based on the maximum displacement and maximum inter-story drift ratio. Finally, the proposed method is successfully applied to a building-safety assessment by using earthquake-induced building responses suffering from missing data. This study is conducive to the extensive engineering application of MEMS-based cost-effective building monitoring and rapid after-earthquake assessment.
Highlights
Civil structures, such as buildings, bridges, and tunnels working in the natural environment, suffer from structural deterioration and even natural disasters in their long-term service life
In order to promote the extensive application of structural health monitoring (SHM) technology to in-service buildings in earthquake-prone areas, this paper proposes a building-safety monitoring and assessment scheme using cost-effective Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) accelerometers and examines its effectiveness with the use of an in-service building subjected to real earthquakes
The proposed scheme systematically consists of fast missing data reconstruction, fast displacement estimation based on the frequency-domain integral of the acceleration response, and maximum displacement and maximum inter-story drift ratio (IDR)-based assessment
Summary
Civil structures, such as buildings, bridges, and tunnels working in the natural environment, suffer from structural deterioration and even natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes and typhoons) in their long-term service life. Country-scale seismic monitoring networks have been well-established in many earthquake-prone countries, including the USA, China, Japan, and Italy. These national networks are intended to determine the occurrence time, epicenter location, and magnitude of an earthquake. Building-scale networks are further conceived for structural health monitoring (SHM) and damage assessment with different assessment indexes [3,4,5]. It is noted that the sensor density in a building-scale network is normally much higher than that of an urban- or country-scale network. The application of building-scale monitoring is limited, due to the need for a great number of sensors and the associated high price of SHM systems
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