The UCLA Factor building seismic array: monitoring structural state of health

Abstract

The development of robust designs in seismometer hardware and software is making it more feasible to densely instrument civil structures on a permanent basis in order to study their states of health. The 17-story UCLA Factor building contains one of those cutting-edge structural arrays, recording building vibrations continuously at high sample rates. It is one of only a handful of buildings in the U.S. permanently instrumented on every floor, providing us with information about how a common class of urban structures, mid-rise moment-frame steel buildings, will respond to strong ground shaking and how the response changes as the building is damaged. For example, structural stiffness undoubtedly decreased when welded beam-column connections extensively fractured in numerous moment-frame steel buildings during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Unfortunately, there are no seismic records from buildings with this type of damage. However, we anticipate that changes should be observable through analysis of vibration data for a well-instrumented building.

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