Structural Health Monitoring of Reinforced Concrete Structures using Nonlinear Interferometric Analysis

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) aims to improve knowledge of the safety and maintainability of civil structures and infrastructures. Within the Italian research project RELUIS-DPC 2010-2013, funded by the Italian Department of Civil Protection, a specific task deals with the possibility of set up a fast procedure to determine the damage evolution on a large number of structures after seismic events. This paper presents an upgrade of a method for damage detection based on a statistical approach that uses the most significant data recorded on both the top floor and the bottom of a building, with the purpose of extracting the value of the maximum inter-story drift expected along the building height, adopted as damage indicator. Nonlinear interferometric analyses combined with the S-Transform are used to evaluate frequencies and damping variation of the monitored structure during an earthquake. The method has been tested on numerical reinforced concrete framed structures.