Direct identification of reduced building models based on noisy measurements for performance based earthquake engineering

Structural health monitoring (SHM) represents a useful tool in preventing structural failures. SHM can help to identify deviations between the structural properties at the design stage and those of the actual construction, and to detect aging effects as well as accumulated damage, which can contribute to uncertainty related to the seismic performance. Developing a method that can effectively be applied without the need for expensive high precision monitoring devices represents a key issue in order to broadly install this type of technology in the built environment. An identification method is therefore proposed that takes into consideration the noise level of the monitoring instrumentation as an input and can lead to relatively accurate results even for high levels of noise. Formulating a reduced numerical model of the structural system represents one major component of the proposed method; the identified reduced structural model is then used in order to predict the structural performance levels in accordance with seismic assessment regulations in cases of damaged and undamaged building structural systems •Low computing cost and number of sensors required by NMDI method.•Denoising technique is implemented, permitting measurements of higher levels of noise.•Close identification of stiffness and damping matrices of the reduced structure's model.•Ease to implement PBD procedure based on NMDI's results and drift damage states.