EVALUACIÓN DE DAÑO EN EDIFICIOS CONSIDERANDO LOS EFECTOS DE INTERACCIÓN SUELO

Abstract

Damage detection in buildings is vitally important to avoid human losses. For buildings founded on soft soil, as in Mexico City, Soil-Structure Interaction Effects (SSI) are also important. Both phenomena affect directly the dynamic response of a structure, thus it is important to consider them as useful tools for retrofiting or demolition decisions. Currently, most damage detection methods for are formulated for structures founded on a fixed base, which in the case of soft soils is not realistic. In this work, damage (loss of stiffness) assessment in buildings is improved applying deconvolution techniques to dynamic responses to eliminate Soil-Structure Interaction (SSI) effects. Using transfer functions (TF) to suppress the influence of the flexible base the modal information becomes more precise, thus, resulting on enhanced damage identification results. In this work the Baseline Stiffness Method (BSM, Rodríguez, 2007) is applied, since allows to locate and measure severity of damage in buildings without baseline modal information (undamaged state), using solely the approximated lateral stiffness of the first storey and some acceleration records of the damaged system. Simulated damage cases in two shear beam buildings and a real damage case of a reinforce concrete building were studied. The results demonstrate that the proposed methodology improves damage assessment, identifying for the two shear beam models all the elements simulated as damaged and not reporting false elements as occur when not deconvoluted signals are used. For the real case study, the methodology also eliminated the false elements found when no deconvoluted signals were used. Also all the elements forming the connection where cracks of more than 5 cm were reported, were correctly located. One zone with cracks of 1 cm which had not been reported before, was identified when the proposed methodology is applied.