An integrated structural monitoring system for enhanced management of high-rise buildings

Abstract

The number of high-rise buildings worldwide has increased rapidly and this trend is set to continue. As symbols of a city they often incorporate new materials, special designs or stretch the limits of technical capability. For the validation of a building’s design, ongoing safety and maintenance, structural health monitoring systems can be used.

Structural health monitoring systems are designed to be structure-specific and help in gaining information about structural performance. The monitoring system development process is mainly governed by the information required by civil and structural engineers and can therefore be seen as an engineering task. An operation oriented approach focused on providing information instead of raw data is proposed in this research and the development process is generalised to allow the creation of user-centric structural health monitoring systems for any civil engineering structure.

Data storage and management are at the heart of structural monitoring systems. However, the methods for storing and accessing data have never been optimised for large amounts of continuous time series data and dedicated management and processing tasks are unavailable. As such, the new TB-tree (temporally blurred tree) data structure has been developed to address data storage and management issues and three software applications have been developed to demonstrate its capabilities.

By implementing the generalised development process and the evaluation of current sensor strategies, a prototype integrated structural health monitoring system to obtain the most structural information is developed. To bridge the gap between research and practice, an operation-oriented user-centric system with use of the building information modelling paradigm is proposed.