Model Updating of a Nine-Story Concrete Core Wall Building

This paper describes the model updating techniques utilized for a nine-story concrete core wall building located on the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver, Canada. Constructed in 1963, in a region of high seismic risk, the tower is slated for retrofit in the near future. The first five floors of the tower are connected to an adjacent, recently retrofitted five-story building. A structural model was created in finite element software using the original design documents. The dynamic properties of the structure were then determined experimentally through an ambient vibration test. Model updating was implemented to better match the model predictions to experimental results. The model updating targeted many parameters for specific structural elements to arrive at a strong correlation with the experimental results. A total of seven natural frequencies were matched.