Application of Timoshenko beam theory to the estimation of structural response

•Timoshenko beam theory is used to model structural response of high-rise buildings.•With min. instrumentation, structural resp. at non-instrumented floors is inferred.•TBBE method handles vital higher-mode contributions in tall buildings more precisely.•TBBE method outperforms existing linear and cubic (spline) interpolation methods.

Multi-story buildings are usually instrumented at a limited number of floors. Consequently, the structural response (e.g., acceleration, displacement) at the non-instrumented floors remains unknown and needs to be estimated using the acceleration data recorded at the instrumented floors. The prevailing way to estimate the unknown structural response is to interpolate the recorded data over the height of the building. Other methods such as the Mode Shape Based Estimation (MSBE) and Timoshenko Beam Based Estimation (TBBE) methods, on the other hand, use the mode shapes of bending, shear and Timoshenko beam modeling to estimate the unknown structural response. The Factor Building at the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, California, USA is utilized to test the performance of these methods, and the results are compared with conventional interpolation methods (e.g., linear or cubic spline interpolations). The results show clearly that both the MSBE and the TBBE methods provide a better estimation of unknown structural response than both linear interpolation methods.