Development of the Structural Damage Monitoring System Using "Buckling-Restrained Brace With Built-In Displacement Sensor"

Abstract eng:
During the Great East Japan Earthquake, in areas 400 to 500 km from the epicenter with Japanese seismic intensity of 3, skyscrapers swayed greatly making the people inside anxious, and afterwards there were cases where judgment regarding the continued use of the building was requested. Since then, there have been increasing activities to utilize monitoring of skyscrapers for judgments of whether or not such buildings can continue to be used. However, currently the number of owners of skyscrapers who perform monitoring is still small. The biggest reason for this is the high cost of installing the monitoring equipment and taking continuous measurements. In addition, monitoring technology is still evolving. At the current time, the prevalent level of measuring systems is only monitoring using acceleration sensors, but when using this measuring method on skyscrapers where bending deformation is large, there is a technical problem in that it is difficult to measure the inter-story deformation component which has high correlation with damage since the horizontal displacement component due to the twist angle is measured regardless of whether any inter-story displacement has occurred in the upper stories. The new system for monitoring the degree of structural damage proposed in this paper is monitoring with devices integrating buckling restrained braces as damping members. The system is inexpensive since it involves only the addition of small measuring devices to the damping members that are required by the plan. It then becomes easy to directly grasp the inter-story deformation component by measuring the displacement of the braces. The damping braces themselves are locations for large displacements, so there is no need to go to the trouble of searching for places with large displacements in order to deploy sensors for the monitoring plan. Since a system in which measurement data can be transferred via the internet and collected in a data center can be constructed, enabling central management of building data, there is no need for a data-collection system in each building, and in the event of a major earthquake, information on the damage over a wide area can also be handled. Not only can the degree of damage to a building be determined, the residual seismic performance of damping members can also be judged. In this way, the proposed monitoring system has many advantages, and it can be expected to become a new technology for spreading structural monitoring. Furthermore, this paper also discusses that the proposed monitoring technology is at the stage of practical application based on testing of components of the proposed measuring devices and analysis results from installation in an actual building.

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