Interferometric Analysis of Strong Ground Motion for Structural Health Monitoring: The Example of the L’Aquila, Italy, Seismic Sequence of 2009

Abstract Structural health monitoring (SHM) aims to improve knowledge of the safety and maintainability of civil structures. The usage of recording systems exploiting wireless communication technology is particularly suitable for SHM, especially for rapid response following earthquakes. In this study, both of these issues are combined, and we report on the application of seismic interferometry to SHM using a dataset of seven earthquakes collected using a novel wireless system of accelerometers during the L’Aquila, Italy, seismic sequence in 2009. We show that interferometric analysis allows the estimation of the shear-wave velocity of seismic phases propagating throughout a structure, and, most important for SHM purposes, allows the monitoring of the velocity variations during the aftershock sequence. Moreover, innovatively we apply the S transform to the building response functions retrieved by interferometry to estimate the fundamental resonance frequency and the quality factor Q .

[1]  Dennis Gabor,et al.  Theory of communication , 1946 .

[2]  Mihailo D. Trifunac,et al.  Impulse response analysis of the Van Nuys 7‐storey hotel during 11 earthquakes and earthquake damage detection , 2008 .

[3]  Anthony Lomax,et al.  Rupture history of the 2009 L'Aquila (Italy) earthquake from non‐linear joint inversion of strong motion and GPS data , 2009 .

[4]  Maria I. Todorovska,et al.  Seismic Interferometry of a Soil-Structure Interaction Model with Coupled Horizontal and Rocking Response , 2009 .

[5]  R. Borcherdt.  Effects of local geology on ground motion near San Francisco Bay , 1970 .

[6]  Roel Snieder,et al.  Extracting the Building Response Using Seismic Interferometry: Theory and Application to the Millikan Library in Pasadena, California , 2006 .

[7]  D. Herak,et al.  Empirical estimates of dynamic parameters on a large set of European buildings , 2010 .

[8]  H. Engl,et al.  Regularization of Inverse Problems , 1996 .

[9]  Mihailo D. Trifunac,et al.  Earthquake damage detection in the Imperial County Services Building III: Analysis of wave travel times via impulse response functions , 2008 .

[10]  Mihailo D. Trifunac,et al.  Variability of the fixed‐base and soil–structure system frequencies of a building—The case of Borik‐2 building , 2010 .

[11]  Atilla Ansal,et al.  Seismic Input Motion Determined from a Surface–Downhole Pair of Sensors: A Constrained Deconvolution Approach , 2010 .

[12]  C. Robert Pinnegar,et al.  The S-transform with windows of arbitrary and varying shape , 2003 .

[13]  Maria Rosaria Gallipoli,et al.  Non-parametric analysis of a single seismometric recording to obtain building dynamic parameters , 2007 .

[14]  Angelo Masi,et al.  Far field damage on RC buildings: the case study of Navelli during the L’Aquila (Italy) seismic sequence, 2009 , 2011 .

[15]  Erdal Şafak.  Propagation of seismic waves in tall buildings , 1998 .

[16]  Anne S. Kiremidjian,et al.  A modular, wireless damage monitoring system for structures , 1998 .

[17]  Edward H. Field,et al.  A comparison and test of various site-response estimation techniques, including three that are not reference-site dependent , 1995 .

[18]  Rocco Ditommaso,et al.  Monitoring the response and the back-radiated energy of a building subjected to ambient vibration and impulsive action: the Falkenhof Tower (Potsdam, Germany) , 2010 .

[19]  Mihailo D. Trifunac,et al.  On identification of Damage in Structures Via Wave Travel Times , 2001 .

[20]  Thomas H. Heaton,et al.  Variations in the Natural Frequencies of Millikan Library Caused by Weather and Small Earthquakes , 2005 .

[21]  Mario Bertero,et al.  Introduction to Inverse Problems in Imaging , 1998 .

[22]  Kiyoshi Kanai,et al.  Some New Problems of Seismic Vibrations of a Structure. Part 1. , 1963 .

[23]  C. Milkereit,et al.  Wireless technologies for the monitoring of strategic civil infrastructures: an ambient vibration test on the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Suspension Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey , 2010 .

[24]  Lalu Mansinha,et al.  Localization of the complex spectrum: the S transform , 1996, IEEE Trans. Signal Process..

[25]  Thomas H. Heaton,et al.  Propagating Waves in the Steel, Moment-Frame Factor Building Recorded during Earthquakes , 2007 .

[26]  Lucia Luzi,et al.  The Mw 6.3, 2009 L’Aquila earthquake: source, path and site effects from spectral analysis of strong motion data , 2009 .

[27]  Marco Vona,et al.  Empirical estimate of fundamental frequencies and damping for Italian buildings , 2009 .

[28]  Can Zulfikar,et al.  The Self-organizing Seismic Early Warning Information Network (SOSEWIN) , 2009 .

[29]  Erdal Safak,et al.  Wave-Propagation Formulation of Seismic Response of Multistory Buildings , 1999 .

[30]  Marco Vona,et al.  Real time monitoring of structures in task force missions: the example of the Mw = 6.3 Central Italy Earthquake, April 6, 2009 , 2010 .

[31]  Christoph Sens-Schönfelder,et al.  Fault zone monitoring with passive image interferometry , 2007 .

[32]  Peter Bormann,et al.  Suitability of rapid energy magnitude determinations for emergency response purposes , 2010 .

[33]  S. Mallat.  A wavelet tour of signal processing , 1998 .

[34]  Stefano Parolai,et al.  Denoising of Seismograms Using the S Transform , 2009 .

[35]  D. Bindi,et al.  The 6 April 2009 Mw 6.3 L'Aquila (Central Italy) Earthquake: Strong-motion Observations , 2009 .

[36]  Yang Wang,et al.  Performance monitoring of the Geumdang Bridge using a dense network of high-resolution wireless sensors , 2006, Smart Materials and Structures.

[37]  Maria I. Todorovska,et al.  Soil-Structure System Identification of Millikan Library North–South Response during Four Earthquakes (1970–2002): What Caused the Observed Wandering of the System Frequencies? , 2009 .

[38]  Angelo Masi,et al.  Analysis of RC Building Dynamic Response and Soil-Building Resonance Based on Data Recorded during a Damaging Earthquake (Molise, Italy, 2002) , 2004 .

[39]  Robert Glenn Stockwell,et al.  A basis for efficient representation of the S-transform , 2007, Digit. Signal Process..

[40]  Atilla Ansal,et al.  The Ataköy vertical array (Turkey): Insights into seismic wave propagation in the shallow-most crustal layers by waveform deconvolution , 2009 .

[41]  Thomas H. Heaton,et al.  The Observed Wander of the Natural Frequencies in a Structure , 2006 .