Real-time structural health monitoring of a supertall building under construction based on visual modal identification strategy

This paper presents a real-time structural health monitoring technique for a supertall building under construction, Lotte World Tower (LWT), the tallest building in Korea. To evaluate the state and safety of the supertall building under construction, this study presents a visual modal identification method to identify mode shape and damping ratio based on modal responses from the monitoring system. In the method, mode shape and damping are visually identified from the time history plotting of well-filtered modal responses in real time. Since the presented method does not include a kind of complex calculation for measured data required in the previous SI methods, it can avoid time consuming in system identification (SI) as well as variation in value of modal parameter extracted from measurement. An ambient vibration test on the LWT under construction was performed in 2015. Using the test data, the presented method identified the mode shapes and damping of the LWT visually with small variations without any complicated computations. Further, this study presents a model updating method with a simplified pseudo frame model to construct a baseline model for the LWT under construction using measured modal responses. The validity of the updated model for the LWT was verified through estimations of mode shape and structural responses.