Revamping Building Structures through Design of Seismic Monitoring Network for Karachi using Tri-axial Digital Sensors

The city of Karachi is the largest city in Pakistan and the capital of the province of Sindh. Being the financial and commercial hub of Pakistan, the city of Karachi has been declared amongst the seismic hit zones of the country. The historical earthquakes detected in this region were appeared to be at locations 23.7 N 67.5 and 25.0 N 66.7 . Although the seismic activity in this city is least, 00 0 0 nevertheless its prolong negligence is a matter of concern keeping in view the commercial imprtance associated to the area. In errecting the buildings of stratgic importance in karachi, no care has been made so far as to comply with international building codes. Hence most of the buildings in the city are not likely to sustain seismic shaking, if it strikes. This research is regarding development of seismic resilient network for revamping existing buildings' infrastructure of Karachi city. Through strategically installed strong motion digital sensors at various locations and floors of the buildings in the city, the real time traces are obtained. The anomalies between the traces are analyzed at various time stamps and these are correlated with the pre-defined samples of the vibrational modes of each of the sites. These differences are then used to invoke decisions in respect of strengthening the respective structures before any seismic event is occurred in future. The real time vibration information is also disseminated to data processing and recording centers and to the concerned users. The analysis of communication channels for best fit scenarios over the performance matrix of link quality, link reliability, guaranteed data transfer, error control, QoS, jitter, packet loss and throughput in relaying the data to the users and to the data processing station are performed using OPNET software and based upon the simulated results, the network is installed. The system is capable of producing results for week building structures after detecting strong motion signals through installed digital seismic sensors.