Dynamic Vibration Characteristics Monitoring of High-Rise Buildings by Interferometric Real-Aperture Radar Technique: Laboratory and Full-Scale Tests

Dynamic vibration characteristics monitoring of high-rise buildings is of great significance for evaluating their safety operation conditions, verifying structural design parameters and updating numerical models. A ground-based real-aperture radar (RAR) has been applied to a high-rise building in Wuhan, China. In the case of RAR measurements, in which several points in the same range bins can add unexpected multiplicity contributions due to spatial resolution varying with distance, the static clutter effect must be removed. However, only a few studies have analyzed it. In this paper, we introduced the least squares fitting circle method to eliminate the static clutter. On this basis, the accuracy of instrument deformation detection is verified by a precise stepping mobile platform in laboratory. Subsequently, we established a sequential quadratic programming-genetic algorithm (SQP-GA) to identify the dynamic vibration characteristics of buildings under natural environment excitation. The SQP-GA method not only accurately identifies the resonance frequencies, but also directly extracts the amplitudes of sine and cosine components of the building vibration signals under the resonance frequencies response compared with the traditional spectrum analysis based on fast Fourier transform.