Tracing Earthquake-Induced Damage in Instrumented Buildings: A Wavelet-Based Approach

This study presents a novel seismic damage detection framework for building structures along with an innovative damage index. The proposed framework leverages solely the data captured during an earthquake event to detect and localize damage and eliminates the need for corresponding data from the undamaged state, and the proposed damage index formalizes the framework’s application to enable its widespread use. The proposed damage index quantifies the distinctive shift in vibration frequencies from the elastic modal frequency as a consequence of structural damage incurred during seismic events. The damage index is calculated at every time step of motion and for each mode under consideration, enabling the tracking of damage progression over time. Within the proposed framework, the damage index is combined with modal interstory drifts to offer insights into the location of damage. The efficacy of the proposed framework in detecting and locating seismic damage is validated through numerical analysis of two structures. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework as a robust method for seismic damage detection.