A Comparative Study of Damage-Sensitive Features for Rapid Data-Driven Seismic Structural Health Monitoring

• Published in: Applied sciences Vol. 13; no. 4; p. 2708
• Main Authors: Reuland, Yves, Martakis, Panagiotis, Chatzi, Eleni
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.02.2023
• Subjects: Buildings; Built environment; Comparative analysis; Comparative studies; Concrete; Damage assessment; Damage detection; damage identification; damage-sensitive features; Diagnostic systems; Earthquake damage; Earthquakes; High rise buildings; Inspection; Localization; Masonry; Monitoring; Nonlinearity; Parametric analysis; Physics; post-earthquake building assessment; Real property; Real time; Recovery of function; Reinforced concrete; Seismic activity; Seismic engineering; Seismic response; seismic structural health monitoring; Seismology; Sensors; Shake table tests; Structural health monitoring; Structural response; Technology application; Urban environments; Valuation; Vibration; vibration-based monitoring
• DOI: 10.3390/app13042708
• ISSN: 2076-3417

Rapid post-earthquake damage assessment forms a critical element of resilience, ensuring a prompt and functional recovery of the built environment. Monitoring-based approaches have the potential to significantly improve upon current visual inspection-based condition assessment that is slow and potentially subjective. The large variety of sensing solutions that has become available at affordable cost in recent years allows the engineering community to envision permanent-monitoring applications even in conventional low-to-mid-rise buildings. When combined with adequate structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques, sensor data recorded during earthquakes have the potential to provide automated near-real-time identification of earthquake damage. Near-real time building assessment relies on the tracking of damage-sensitive features (DSFs) that can be directly and rapidly derived from dynamic monitoring data and scaled with damage. We here offer a comprehensive review of such damage-sensitive features in an effort to formally assess the capacity of such data-driven indicators to detect, localize and quantify the presence of nonlinearity in seismic-induced structural response. We employ both a parametric analysis on a simulated model and real data from shake-table tests to investigate the strengths and limitations of purely data-driven approaches, which typically involve a comparison against a healthy reference state. We present an array of damage-sensitive features which are found to be robust with respect to noise, to reliably detect and scale with nonlinearity, and to carry potential to localize the occurrence of nonlinear behavior in conventional structures undergoing earthquakes.