Assessment of the Damage Estimation System in Nikken Sekkei Tokyo Building

The writers have developed a damage estimation system to evaluate the level of vibration and the damage state of a building after an earthquake. This system is already in operation in several buildings. It consists in setting three-axis-acceleration sensors in a limited number of floor of a building and to estimate the acceleration of the other floors based on spline interpolation. Then, acceleration is integrated to calculate the velocity, the relative displacement and the absolute displacement; which are compared with threshold values designed by a structural engineer to give a quantitative estimation of damage intensity. Five items are considered: the main structure, the cladding, the MEP, the ceiling and the furniture. This system is in operation in Nikken Sekkei Tokyo building since 2014 and recorded, among other, the March 2015 Ogasawara open sea earthquake. This report proposes a comparison of the results of this system and of numerical calculations for several recorded earthquake to validate the performances of this damage estimation system.