DEVELOPMENT OF A MONITORING SYSTEM FOR DAMAGE ASSESSMENT OF BUILDINGS AFTER EARTHQUAKES

Damage assessment of structures after extreme events such as earthquakes is an essential and critical task for owners, users, authorities and the community. Accurate and quick damage assessment of structures can effectively reduce economic losses and speed up the reconstruction of the affected earthquake region. Visual inspection is currently the most common damage assessment technique. However, this technique is subjective, time consuming, dangerous for inspectors and not reliable for complex and large structures. Following this approach, building owners need to wait in line for their buildings to be visually inspected and tagged by city officials or evaluated by an engineer in order to assess the status of their building. This process may take days, weeks or even months due to the large number of buildings requiring inspections and evaluations. Given these shortcomings in visual inspection, significant research has been carried out by researchers over the past several years to determine the feasibility of vibration based damage assessment of instrumented structures and establish a coherent and consistent set of techniques and methodologies of real-time damage detection and performance evaluation. In this paper, new computational tools for damage identification and long-term dynamic monitoring, developed in the MATLAB environment, are described. The toolkits provide functions for automated dynamic parameters and response amplitudes monitoring. The potential of these toolkits is illustrated using data collected by a continuous dynamic monitoring system installed on a building in Wellington, New Zealand.