New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering Conference
Research Status
Complete
Notes
April 13-15, 2012, Christchurch, New Zealand
Summary
The Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology Arts and Media building was completed in 2011 and consists of three seismically separate complexes. This research focussed on the Arts building as it showcases the use of coupled post-tensioned timber shear walls. These are part of the innovative Expan system. Full-scale, in-situ dynamic testing of the novel building was combined with finite element modelling and updating to obtain an understanding of the structural dynamic performance within the linear range. Ambient testing was performed at three stages during construction and was combined with forced vibration testing for the final stage. This forms part of a larger instrumentation program developed to investigate the wind and seismic response and long term deformations of the building. A finite element model of the building was formulated and updated using experimental modal characteristics. It was shown that the addition of non-structural elements, such as cladding and the staircase, increased the natural frequency of the first mode and the second mode by 19% and 24%, respectively. The addition of the concrete floor topping as a structural diaphragm significantly increased the natural frequency of the first mode but not the second mode, with an increase of 123% and 18%, respectively. The elastic damping of the NMIT building at low-level vibrations was identified as being between 1.6% and 2.4%
This paper describes the design of a system to monitor floor vibrations in an office building and an analysis of several months worth of collected data. Floors of modern office buildings are prone to occupant-induced vibrations. The contributing factors include long spans, slender and flexible designs, use of lightweight materials and low damping. As a result, resonant frequencies often fall in the range easily excited by normal footfall loading, creating potential serviceability problems due to undesirable levels of vibrations. This study investigates in-situ performance of a non-composite timber-concrete floor located in a recently constructed innovative multi-storey office building. The floor monitoring system consists of several displacement transducers to measure long-term deformations due to timber and concrete creep and three accelerometers to measure responses to walking forces, the latter being the focus of this paper. Floor response is typically complex and multimodal and the optimal accelerometer locations were decided with the help of the effective independence-driving point residue (EfI-DPR) technique. A novel approach to the EfI-DPR method proposed here uses a combinatorial search algorithm that increases the chances of obtaining the globally optimal solution. Several months worth of data collected by the monitoring system were analyzed using available industry guidelines, including ISO2631-1:1997(E), ISO10137:2007(E) and SCI Publication P354. This enabled the evaluation of the floor performance under real operating conditions.
