Monitoring horizontal displacements in a vertical profile of a tall industrial chimney using Global Positioning System technology for detecting dynamic characteristics

Global Positioning System (GPS) dual-frequency receivers installed at three various levels were used in two field tests to record the response of the 300-m tall industrial chimney, located in the power station of Bechatow (Poland), exposed to the light wind and temperature variations. The fast Fourier transformation and the peak-picking approach based on the band-pass filtering technique (a second-order Type 1 Chebyshev band-pass) were employed to detect dominant natural frequencies and relevant vibrations of the maximum displacements of the chimney. The damping ratios for both tests were also determined. The estimated first natural frequencies and mode shapes, using GPS measurements, matched well with predicted from a calculation of the finite element model, created for the chimney. The assessment of measurement errors caused by GPS system before and after filtering is also presented. This paper concludes that GPS is a viable tool for detecting the structural dynamic characteristics and that GPS is capable of tracking the vibrations of long-period structures to a few millimetresin our tests to 2mm during short time intervals. These results were obtained by using the GPS 10Hz filtered data. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.