Monitoring a steel building using GPS sensors

To assess the performance of a structure requires the measurement of global and relative displacements at critical points across the structure. They should be obtained in real time and in all weather condition. A Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) could satisfy the last two requirements. The American Global Position System (GPS) provides long term acquisitions with sampling rates sufficient to track the displacement of long period structures. The accuracy is of the order of sub-centimetres. The steel building which hosts the authors' laboratory is the reference case-study within this paper. First a comparison of data collected by GPS sensor units with data recorded by tri-axial accelerometers is carried out when dynamic vibrations are induced in the structure by movements of the internal bridge-crane. The elaborations from the GPS position readings are then compared with the results obtained by a Finite Element (FE) numerical simulation. The purposes are: i) to realize a refinement of the structural parameters which characterize the building and ii) to outline a suitable way for processing GPS data toward structural monitoring.