Labview-Based Virtual Instrumentation for Seismic Building Vibration and Structural Damage Monitoring

Continuous structural health monitoring is vital for assessing civil infrastructure integrity underseismic excitations and environmental degradation. Traditional manual visual inspections are periodic,qualitative, and incapable of capturing transient dynamic responses. This paper presents a virtual instrumentationframework developed in LabVIEW for real-time seismic vibration simulation, dynamic response monitoring, andstructural damage detection. A base-excited single-degree-of-freedom mass-spring-damper model isimplemented to simulate structural dynamics under ambient shaking, resonance, sudden stiffness reduction,structural tilt, and pseudo-random earthquake ground motion. The virtual instrument tracks critical dynamicindicators including fundamental natural frequency, roof-to-base transmissibility ratio, instantaneous roofacceleration, and tilt angle, triggering a multi-criteria threshold alarm logic upon abnormal state detection.Simulation findings demonstrate that a 48.5% loss in lateral stiffness (from 1300 N/m to 670 N/m) induces a 0.51Hz downward shift in natural frequency (from 1.81 Hz to 1.30 Hz), confirming frequency tracking as a sensitivedamage indicator. A proposed hardware acquisition architecture incorporating dual MEMS accelerometers(ADXL345 and MPU6050) interfaced via microcontroller serial streaming to LabVIEW VISA is documented. Thisprototype provides an educational testbed for structural dynamics and non-destructive damage diagnosis.