Damage-induced deflection approach for damage localization and quantification of shear buildings: validation on a full-scale shear building

This paper presents the full-scale experimental validation of the damage-induced deflection approach recently developed for damage detection and quantification of shear buildings. In the approach, an additional deflection induced by damage is used to estimate its location and severity because the deflection contains essential information about the damage. In this study, damage location and severity of a five-story full-scale shear building was estimated, not measured directly, by modal flexibility matrices obtained from acceleration responses of the structure during the shaker excitation at the fourth floor. Two damage cases have been considered by reducing the spring stiffness of the connecting brace at the first floor. In numerical simulations, it was found that the approach successfully identified the damage location and also estimated the damage ratios accurately by using only the lowest two natural frequencies and mode shapes. In the experimental study, a series of tests have been carried out and it was demonstrated that the damaged floor was successfully localized and the damage ratios estimated by the damage-induced deflection approach agreed well with those calculated from numerical simulations.