Damage identification study of a seven-story full-scale building slice tested on the UCSD-NEES shake table

A full-scale seven-story reinforced concrete building section was tested on the UCSD-NEES shake table during the period October 2005–January 2006. The shake table tests were designed to damage the building progressively through four historical earthquake records. At various levels of damage, ambient vibration tests and low-amplitude white noise base excitations with root-mean-square accelerations of 0.03 g and 0.05 g were applied to the building, which responded as a quasi-linear system with parameters evolving as a function of structural damage. Modal parameters (natural frequencies, damping ratios and mode shapes) of the building were identified at different damage levels based on the response of the building to ambient as well as low-amplitude white noise base excitations, measured using DC coupled accelerometers. This paper focuses on damage identification of this building based on changes in identified modal parameters. A sensitivity-based finite element model updating strategy is used to detect, localize and quantify damage at each damage state considered. Three sets of damage identification results are obtained using modal parameters identified based on ambient, 0.03 g, and 0.05 g RMS white noise test data, respectively. The damage identification results obtained in all three cases do not exactly coincide, but they are consistent with the concentration of structural damage observed at the bottom two stories of the building. The difference in the identified damage results is mainly due to the significant difference in the identified modal parameters used in the three cases. The assumption of a quasi-linear dynamic system is progressively violated with increasing level of excitation. Therefore, application of nonlinear FE model updating strategies is recommended in future studies to resolve the errors caused by structural response nonlinearity.