Damage-sensitive features for rapid damage assessment in a seismic context

Rapid assessment is crucial for a prompt functional recovery of the built environment in the aftermath of disastrous earthquakes. Recent building codes have efficiently lowered the death toll of earthquakes, yet cracks and other kinds of accumulated damage are tolerated and can result in successively weakened structures, which eventually fail. In order to enhance the recovery capacity of communities, rapid damage assessment of the built infrastructure after a seismic event is necessary. Current post-earthquake practices rely on slow and potentially subjective visual inspections. Permanent monitoring installations are met mainly in exceptional cases of seismic prone regions, applied in structures of high importance, such as high-rise buildings. In recent years, however, a large variety of sensing solutions has become available at affordable cost, allowing the engineering community to envision permanent-monitoring applications even in conventional buildings. To this end, instrumented representative buildings can serve as indicators for properly defined building classes. When combined with adequate structural health-monitoring techniques, sensor data recorded during earthquakes have the potential to provide an automated near-real-time detection of possible earthquake damage. However, damage detection in existing buildings is impaired by the presence of multiple non-structural components, a high redundancy in load-bearing elements, elastic non-linearities and the impact of potential localized failure mechanisms. Using a simulated case study of a masonry building, along with data from shake-table tests, the applicability of automated damage detection, through data-driven damage-sensitive features, is assessed, along with the potential for quantifying damage in order to proceed with smart-tagging of earthquake-damaged buildings.