Damage Localization in a Building Structure during Seismic Excitation

Aging of buildings during their service life has attracted the attention of researchers on structural health monitoring (SHM). This paper is related with detecting damage in building structures at the earliest possible stage during seismic activity to facilitate decision-making on evacuation before physical inspection is possible. For this, a simple method for damage assessment is introduced to identify the damage story of multistory buildings from acceleration measurements under a wave propagation approach. In this work, damage is assumed as reduction in shear wave velocities and changes in damping ratios that are directly related with stiffness loss. Most damage detection methods are off-line processes; this is not the case with this method. First, a real-time identification system is introduced to estimate the current parameters to be compared with nominal values to detect any changes in the characteristics that may indicate damage in the building. In addition, this identification system is robust to constant disturbances and measurement noise. The time needed to complete parameter identification is shorter compared to the typically wave method, and the damage assessment can keep up with the data flow in real time. Finally, using a robust threshold, postprocess of the compared signal is performed to find the location of the possible damage. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through experiments on a reduced-scale five-story building, showing the ability of the proposed method to improve early stage structural health monitoring.