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The ExxonMobil Corp. oil refinery in Torrance, California, experienced an explosion on 18 February 2015, causing ground shaking equivalent to a magnitude 2.0 earthquake. The impulse response for the source was computed from Southern California Seismic Network data for a single force system with a value of 2 × 105 kN vertically downward. The refinery explosion produced an air pressure wave that was recorded 22.8 km away in a 52-story high-rise building in downtown Los Angeles by a dense accelerometer array that is a component of the Community Seismic Network. The array recorded anomalous waveforms on each floor displaying coherent arrivals that are consistent with the building's elastic response to a pressure wave caused by the refinery explosion. Using a finite-element model of the building, the force on the building on a floor-by-floor scale was found to range up to 1.42 kN, corresponding to a pressure perturbation of 7.7 Pa.

High-rise buildings with dense permanent installations of continuously recording accelerometers offer a unique opportunity to observe temporal and spatial variations in the propagation properties of seismic waves. When precise, floor-by-floor measurements of frequency-dependent travel times can be made, accurate models of material properties (e.g., stiffness or rigidity) can be determined using seismic tomographic imaging techniques. By measuring changes in the material properties, damage to the structure can be detected and localized after shaking events such as earthquakes. Here, seismic Helmholtz tomography is applied to simulated waveform data from a high-rise building, and its feasibility is demonstrated. A 52-story dual system building-braced-frame core surrounded by an outrigger steel moment frame-in downtown Los Angeles is used for the computational basis. It is part of the Community Seismic Network and has a three-component accelerometer installed on every floor. A finite-element model of the building based on structural drawings is used for the computation of synthetic seismograms for 60 damage scenarios in which the stiffness of the building is perturbed in different locations across both adjacent and distributed floors and to varying degrees. The dynamic analysis loading function is a Gaussian pulse applied to the lowest level fixed boundary condition, producing a broadband response on all floors. After narrowband filtering the synthetic seismograms and measuring the maximum amplitude, the frequency-dependent travel times and differential travel times are computed. The travel-time and amplitude measurements are converted to shear-wave velocity at each floor via the Helmholtz wave equation whose solutions can be used to track perturbations to wavefronts through densely sampled wavefields. These results provide validation of the method's application to recorded data from real buildings to detect and locate structural damage using earthquake, explosion, or ambient seismic noise data in near-real time. Electronic Supplement: Table and figures describing nine additional velocity imaging tests that were run using the same procedure described in the main article.

No abstract

A method based on template matching is presented to detect and locate damage in buildings following severe shaking by an earthquake. The templates are constructed by finite-element simulations of a suite of damage scenarios, with the solutions evaluated at the location (and orientation) of each sensor in the structure. The damage detection is carried out by cross-correlating the templates with recordings acquired from earthquakes. A dense distributed network of sensors is important for detecting anomalies in the presence of ambient noise. The cross correlation of the templates with themselves provides a measure of the resolution of the damage location.

The linear-elastic response of a building structure subjected to an earthquake base excitation can be approximated as the response of a continuous, spatially inhomogenous, dispersive, viscoelastic solid subjected to vertically incident plane shear waves. The frequency-dependent phase velocity and attenuation of seismic energy at different wavelengths, together with the inertial properties of the multilayer solid characterize the response of the building structure. The objective of this study is to identify the structural system by estimating the parameters that characterize the propagation of seismic waves in an equivalent multilayer viscoelastic solid. To pursue this objective, first, the measured dynamic responses of a building structure are used to derive the frequency response functions (FRFs) of the floor absolute acceleration with respect to the base excitation using a seismic interferometry approach. The FRFs obtained from the measured structural responses are then compared with the FRFs estimated using analytical models for one-dimensional shear wave propagation in a multilayer Kelvin-Voigt dispersive medium. Through a recursive Bayesian estimation approach, the parameters characterizing the phase velocity and damping ratio of the multilayer medium are estimated. This study provides a step forward in seismic interferometric identification of building structures by proposing a new method for parametric estimation of shear wave velocity and damping dispersion at the story level of a building structure. The estimated shear wave velocities before and after a damage-inducing event can be used to identify permanent loss of effective lateral stiffness of the building structure at the story level, thus can provide an alternative method for structural health monitoring and damage identification.

Coherent patterns and large variations in ground shaking amplification were observed in the Los Angeles basin during the 2019 M7.1 Ridgecrest earthquake. In particular, 3 s to 6 s responses showed variations due to shallow basin geological structure that have implications for the response to large earthquakes of mid-rises, high-rises, long-span bridges, and fuel storage tanks, even if epicentral distances are several hundred kilometers. The Ridgecrest strong-motion data were recorded by seismic stations from the spatially dense Community Seismic Network, the Southern California Seismic Network, and the California Strong Motion Instrumentation Program. The mainshock observations are compared at the same locations with ground motion simulations to examine the regions that experienced the largest shaking, and to investigate the geological sources of large-amplitude shaking. The simulations were computed for the two most commonly-used regional community seismic velocity models, CVM-S4.26.M01 ('CVM-S') and CVM-H 15.1.0 ('CVM-H'). Both observations and simulations are used in dynamic analysis with a finite-element model of an existing high-rise with ~6-second fundamental horizontal periods, located in downtown Los Angeles. The geographical variation in maximum story drift, story-level shear force, and story-level moment values suggest that the excitation of a hypothetical high-rise located in an area characterized by the largest 6-s PSA values could be significantly larger than in a downtown Los Angeles location. Ground motion simulations using the CVM-H velocity model more closely predict the long-period site amplifications in greater Los Angeles, particularly in the south-central San Fernando Valley, than simulations using CVM-S.