Smart System Identification of Super High-Rise Buildings using Limited Vibration Data during the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake

A method of smart system identification of super high-rise buildings is proposed in which super high-rise buildings are modeled by a shear-bending system. The method is aimed at finding the story shear and bending stiffnesses of a specific story only from the horizontal floor accelerations. The proposed method uses a set of closed-form expressions for the story shear and bending stiffnesses in terms of the limited floor accelerations and utilizes a reduced shear-bending system with the same number of elements as the observation points. A difficulty of prediction of an unstable specific function in a low frequency range can be overcome by introducing an ARX model and discussing its relation with the Taylor series expansion coefficients of a transfer function. It is demonstrated that the shear-bending system can simulate the vibration records with a reasonable accuracy. It is also shown that the vibration records at two super high-rise buildings during the 2011 Tohoku (Japan) earthquake can be simulated with the proposed method including a technique of inserting degrees of freedom between the vibration recording points. Finally it is discussed further that the time-varying identification of fundamental natural period and stiffnesses can be conducted by setting an appropriate duration of evaluation in the batch least-squares method.