Tall buildings are one of the few constructed facilities whose design relies solely upon analytical and scaled models, which, though based upon fundamental mechanics and years of research and experience, has yet to be systematically validated in full scale. In response to this need, through the combined efforts of members of academe, a design firm and a commercial wind tunnel testing laboratory, a program was initiated to monitor the full-scale response of representative tall buildings and compare this to the predicted response from wind tunnels and finite-element models used commonly in design. As part of this monitoring program, in situ periods and damping ratios over a range of response amplitudes are also being evaluated. This paper provides an overview of the monitoring program, which includes three tall buildings in the city of Chicago, details their instrumentation and modeling, and provides an example of the full-scale response data analyses being conducted.

This study introduces a unique prototype system for structural health monitoring (SHM), SmartSync, which uses the building's existing Internet backbone as a system of virtual instrumentation cables to permit modular and largely plug-and-play deployments. Within this framework, data streams from distributed heterogeneous sensors are pushed through network interfaces in real time and seamlessly synchronized and aggregated by a centralized server, which performs basic data acquisition, event triggering, and database management while also providing an interface for data visualization and analysis that can be securely accessed. The system enables a scalable approach to monitoring tall and complex structures that can readily interface a variety of sensors and data formats (analog and digital) and can even accommodate variable sampling rates. This study overviews the SmartSync system, its installation/operation in the world's tallest building, Burj Khalifa, and proof-of-concept in triggering under dual excitations (wind and earthquake).

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