Implementation and application of a SHM system for tall buildings in Turkey

Number of tall buildings in metropolitan areas such as Istanbul increased dramatically in recent years. On the other hand, it is crucial to conduct condition assessment of such structures after an earthquake due to public safety and owner-need reasons. Structural health monitoring (SHM) enables condition assessment of structures before, during and after earthquake rapidly, remotely and objectively. SHM systems are mandatory to be installed on tall buildings in Turkey since 2019 because of their significant contribution to our understanding of dynamic behavior of tall buildings and our capability of condition monitoring. With the motivations and reasons mentioned above, three tall buildings in Istanbul have been monitored continuously by the research team led by the second author. In the first part of this paper, results from long-term monitoring of Building-3 are presented and also, identification of modal parameters before, during and after Mw 5.7 earthquake by different methods are discussed. Afterwards, a unique methodology on the development and updating of Timoshenko beam model of the building based on identification results is given. This methodology is able to estimate the accelerations of non-instrumented floors from instrumented floors; therefore, condition assessment of the building during an earthquake can be precisely performed by computing inter-story drift ratios. In addition to tracking modal values and calculating inter-story drifts, determination of wave propagation is explained as an alternative condition assessment tool. Lastly, in-house developed software platform for real-time monitoring of tall buildings is presented.