Integrated seismic early warning and structural health monitoring of critical civil infrastructures in seismically prone areas

Abstract

A large part of Europe is exposed to medium/high seismic risk. Throughout the past decades serious structural damage and collapse have occurred in different countries. Examples of structures at risk are existing infrastructure and public buildings. Efficient seismic protection is especially required in these structures. In fact, an earthquake can lead to a high number of injury or death since these structures are often crowded. On the other hand, strategic structures have to be fully operational to manage the aftershock emergencies. This article deals with some results of a research focused on the development of optimized structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies and data processing techniques for critical structures in seismically prone areas. Specific solutions are proposed to take advantage of seismic early warning systems (SEWSs), which are becoming very popular and effective worldwide. The most relevant aspects of seismic early warning (SEW) and SHM systems are herein reviewed and the main issues related to their integration are discussed in order to properly design the final system. Attention is mainly focused on dynamic behavior in operational conditions and on earthquake effects. Hardware and software solutions adopted for the characterization and monitoring of the dynamic response of a sample building are illustrated pointing out the capability of the same architecture to host data and information provided by SEW applications. Finally, datasets in operational conditions are used to evaluate the fundamental modal parameters of the structure by output-only techniques, whose potentialities and limitations in the presence of weakly and heavily nonstationary signals have been also assessed. In particular, they have been applied, respectively, to the records collected during crowded football matches hosted at the stadium located nearby the sample building and during the recent L’Aquila earthquake mainshock

Technical Note: Active and Semi-Active Strategies to Control Building Structures Under Large Earthquake Motion

“…From the results of two case studies combining a realistic structural model and wireless simulations collected from real-world deployments, the authors concluded that both approaches improve structural control performance. Finally, Rainieri et al [2011] presented an overview on seismic early warning networks implemented worldwide, along with the development of integrated optimized structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies.…”

Phase Space Dissimilarity Measures for Structural Health Monitoring

“…Wu et al (2010) present the monitoring of a historic tower in Trento, Italy, which provided valuable information about the structure and its behavior. Rainieri et al (2010) discuss integration of SHM systems with seismic early warning systems (SEWS). This concept is of special interest because the algorithm presented in this paper is potentially applicable to both types of monitoring, which would make the integration of those two systems much easier than with other algorithms.…”

“…This concept is of special interest because the algorithm presented in this paper is potentially applicable to both types of monitoring, which would make the integration of those two systems much easier than with other algorithms. Rainieri et al (2010) further discuss the possibility of using a city-wide system not only for monitoring and forewarning, but also for emergency management after a seismic event. Fabbrocino et al (2009) investigate SHM for retaining walls by means of instrumenting piles.…”

Synergistic combination of systems for structural health monitoring and earthquake early warning for structural health prognosis and diagnosis

“…One of the most successful engineering applications of EEW is the Urgent Earthquake Detection and Alarm System (UrEDAS) of the Japan Railway Group [17] for the high-speed Shinkansen trains. Recently, the concept of integrating EEW with SHM in local damage detection [19] or global loss assessment [14] are mentioned by some research groups in Europe. In this paper, our aim is to development a complete synergistic framework between EEW and SHM to optimize the use of the information provided by both systems under a robust Bayesian probabilistic framework.…”