Model updating of a shear-wall tall building using various vibration monitoring data: Accuracy and robustness

Acceleration measurements are often used for model updating of civil engineering structures, especially in the case of seismic monitoring. It is yet unclear if accelerations alone would generate an accurate and robust finite-element (FE) model. This study examines this notion and analyzes the possibility of using other vibration monitoring data for model updating of shear-wall tall buildings. This study compares the accuracy and robustness of the FE models being optimized via accelerations, roof displacement, wall rotations, interstory drift ratios, and the linear combination of these measurements. A numerical case study is analyzed using Timoshenko beams for modeling the lateral vibration of a benchmark 42-story building under seismic excitations. Results show that the acceleration response of the examined building is mostly governed by its higher vibration modes. Depending on the characteristics of ground motions, using accelerations alone may generate an FE model biased towards higher-order modes without effectively capturing the lower-order modes. For instance, the first modal frequency of the updated FE model could be 12.0% lower than the true value, and the reconstructed displacement and rotation responses are noticeably inaccurate. Employing multi-source monitoring data for model updating, for example, the combinations of roof displacement and acceleration measurements, could reduce the normalized root-mean-square errors in displacements by more than 70%. This study also quantifies the robustness of the FE model under various measurement noise levels and 50 pairs of earthquake records. Finally, the effects of multi-source data on FE model updating are validated via experiments on a 7-story shear wall building. Analysis reveals that a more accurate and robust FE model can be determined via a combination of accelerations and top displacement than via acceleration alone.