Development and validation of a post-earthquake safety assessment system for high-rise buildings using acceleration measurements

After a major seismic event, structural safety inspections by qualified experts are required prior to reoccupying a building and resuming operation. Such manual inspections are generally performed by teams of two or more experts and are time consuming, labor intensive, subjective in nature, and potentially put the lives of the inspectors in danger. The authors reported previously on the system for a rapid post-earthquake safety assessment of buildings using sparse acceleration data. The proposed framework was demonstrated using simulation of a five-story steel building modeled with three-dimensional nonlinear analysis subjected to historical earthquakes. The results confirmed the potential of the proposed approach for rapid safety evaluation of buildings after seismic events. However, experimental validation on large-scale structures is required prior to field implementation. Moreover, an extension to the assessment of high-rise buildings, such as those commonly used for residences and offices in modern cities, is needed. To this end, a 1/3-scale 18-story experimental steel building tested on the shaking table at E-Defense in Japan is considered. The importance of online model updating of the linear building model used to calculate the Damage Sensitive Features (DSFs) during the operation is also discussed. Experimental results confirm the efficacy of the proposed approach for rapid post-earthquake safety evaluation for high-rise buildings. Finally, a cost-benefit analysis with respect to the number of sensors used is presented.