The Significance of Dynamic Soil-Structure Interaction in Tall Buildin Gs.

Monitoring Building Structures

“…Examples of this phenomenon of population failure have occurred in the UK in large-panel system-built housing (BRE, 1985;1986; and in long-span school and leisure halls (Bate, 1974;1984;DoE, 1974) amongst others. The wellbeing of such economies is therefore heavily dependent upon the satisfactory performance of its construction.…”

“…For tall buildings these types of measurement have been used by Ellis (1986) to evaluate the effective soil stiffnesses and thereby check theoretical predictors of soil-structure interaction. For example, it is often assumed that the base of a tall building is rigid, however the measured mode shape might indicate movement at the base of the building, indicating that soil-structure interaction is significant.…”

“…The effect of chloride admixtures, described by BRE (1985a;1986), used in Portland cement concrete to accelerate hardening and the carbonation of structural concrete discussed by BRE (1981) and Currie (1986) and the consequent reduction in alkalinity of the environment of the reinforcing steel was the basic factor suspected in all the systems. This was followed quickly by the discovery of structural problems in a wide variety of other non-traditional precast concrete housing systems which were tried in the postwar period (although a few predated this time), mostly for public housing schemes.…”