Estimation of Dynamic Interstory Drift in Buildings Using Wireless Smart Sensors

Interstory drift response is one of most important quantities to quickly assess performance and damages in buildings. Nevertheless, direct measurement of interstory drift is difficult and expensive, because a stationary reference is required to attach measurement devices. With the goal of accurate and fast reference-free estimation, this paper proposes a new strategy to determine dynamic interstory drifts using accelerations. In particular, a Tikhonov regularization is adopted in a generalized minimization problem to achieve an efficient and stable finite impulse response (FIR) filter. Furthermore, due to independent clocks in wireless sensors, accurate time synchronization of the records is critical; consequently, a strategy for accurate synchronization is also presented. Finally, the proposed strategy has been deployed on edge devices for onboard real-time interstory drift estimation. The proposed method for dynamic interstory drift estimation is validated, first, by numerical simulation using earthquake records as base excitation of linear and nonlinear buildings, as well as through laboratory shake table experiments. Both numerical and lab test results show good agreement of dynamic interstory drifts between the measured value and estimated results, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed method to estimate the dynamic displacements of seismically excited structures.