An application of damage detection methods to a real world structure subjected to ground motion excitation

This paper aims at investigating the efficacy of different state-of-art damage detection methods when applied to real world structures subjected to ground motion excitations, for which the literature contributions are, at present, still not fully comprehensive. To this purpose the paper analyses two test structures: (1) a four-story scaled steel frame tested on a shake table in a controlled laboratory conditions, and (2) a seven-story reinforced concrete building monitored during the seismic excitations of the 1999 Chi-Chi (Taiwan) Earthquake main shock and numerous fore and aftershocks. Some model based damage approaches and statistics based damage indexes are reviewed. The different methodologies and indexes are, then, applied to the two test structures with the final aim of analysing their performance and validity within the case of a laboratory scaled model and a real world structure subjected to input ground motion.