Seismic Damage Assessment of Instrumented Wood-frame Buildings: A Case-study of NEESWood Full-scale Shake Table Tests

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonlinear model-based approach to assess seismic damage in instrumented wood-frame buildings by utilizing response measurements and structural modeling, demonstrated through full-scale shake table tests.

Contribution

It presents a novel methodology combining sparse acceleration data with nonlinear structural models to estimate seismic response and damage in wood-frame buildings.

Findings

Effective damage indices were computed from estimated responses.

Remaining useful life predictions were demonstrated.

Methodology validated with full-scale shake table data.

Abstract

The authors propose a methodology to perform seismic damage assessment of instrumented wood-frame buildings using response measurements. The proposed methodology employs a nonlinear model-based state observer that combines sparse acceleration measurements and a nonlinear structural model of a building to estimate the complete seismic response including displacements, velocity, acceleration and internal forces in all structural members. From the estimated seismic response and structural characteristics of each shear wall of the building, element-by-element seismic damage indices are computed and remaining useful life (pertaining to seismic effects) is predicted. The methodology is illustrated using measured data from the 2009 NEESWood Capstone full-scale shake table tests at the E-Defense facility in Japan.