PERFORMANCE-BASED DESIGN AND HEALTH MONITORING SYSTEM

Recently revised Japanese Building Standards Act encourages structural engineers to employ performance-based design rather than conventional specifications-based design. Under this Act, damage tolerant structural systems such as base- isolated buildings and buildings with energy absorption devices are the most attractive structural systems to allow maximum flexibility to designers. However, the damage tolerant structures have never experienced extremely large earthquakes yet. The best way to guarantee the structural performance against extremely large earthquakes is to monitor the response to moderate earthquakes and winds to calibrate the structural performance. A health monitoring system utilizing fiber optic sensors is presented here as a promising candidate for such a purpose.