“Buildings undergo deterioration resulting from (reasons).

By detecting damage early enough, it is

possible for building owners to develop more effective maintenance and rehabilitation programs and
thereby produce significant cost and time saving.” Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has been
conceived as a systematic method for assessing the structural state of pavement infrastructure systems
and documenting their condition. Over the past several years, this process has traditionally been
accomplished using wired sensors. However, the use of wired sensors has limitations for long-term SHM
and presents other associated cost and safety concerns. Recently, Micro-Electromechanical Systems
(MEMS) and Nano-Electromechanical Systems (NEMS) have emerged as advanced/smart-sensing
technologies with potential for cost- effective and long-term SHM.

government buildings, commercial and office buildings, residential buildings, universities and schools,
hospitals, and factories.

The science of structural response to earthquakes is about to get a massive data resource
boost due to a mandate introduced in the Philippines for seismic instrumentation in
buildings.

In 1992, the National Structural Code of the Philippines (NSCP) first introduced the
requirement for seismic monitoring of structures for engineering design purposes. In 2010,
the NSCP stated that buildings above 50 metres should have three seismic monitoring
points installed, but at this time the requirement was not mandatory.

In recent years PHIVOLCS (the national earthquake authority) have warned that an
earthquake of up to magnitude 7.2 is overdue for the West Valley Fault, which would be
potentially devastating for Manila and surrounding populated areas. In 2015, the
Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) issued a directive to all building officials
that the seismic monitoring requirement would no longer have exemptions, and released a
document titled “Guidelines and Implementing Rules on Earthquake Recording
Instrumentation for Buildings”. The requirements for Earthquake Recording Instrumentation
(ERI) apply to existing buildings located in Seismic Zone 4 (the entire Philippines except for
Palawan and Tawi-Tawi which located in Zone 2). Only once this requirement is satisfied will
a renewed Certificate of Occupancy be issued. New building permits will only be issued if
plans to show a provision for a Seismic Instrumentation Room (SIR).

http://www.essearth.com/earthquake-recording-instrumentation-for-buildings/
Earthquake Recording Instrumentation for Buildings
FEBRUARY 23, 2016
http://www.src.com.au/building-monitoring-in-the-philippines/

Building Monitoring in the Philippines

The Republic of the Philippines and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH)
should be applauded for their policy to improve building safety by monitoring urban
environments for response to earthquake. This is a great initiative should be adopted in many
more cities worldwide where the risk of damage from earthquake vibrations has a high short
term probability.

The DPWH “Guidelines and Implementing Rules on Earthquake Recording Instrumentation for
Buildings” outlines which buildings should be monitored due to their size, importance and
classification, which is a reasonable approach that will cover a good selection of building types
for response. The requirement to monitor three points in tall buildings (above 50 metres) is
also solid policy, but the recommendation for buildings with only one accelerograph to have
the instrument located in the Ground Floor/Lowest Basement should be reconsidered.

The main purpose of this policy is to gather information about building response to
earthquake, to enable rapid evaluation of potential damage. By monitoring the ground
movement only, nothing will be learnt about the building response during a seismic event. If a
single accelerograph is to be installed in a building, I highly recommend that this instrument be
located at the top of the building. Monitoring the ground will only provide us with input motion
information, which will be very similar over large areas with similar soil profiles, so top-of-
building motion relative to ground motion recorded at a nearby location would give a better
measure of structural response.

To ensure that the quality of the data will not be compromised, an issue describing the
recording equipment needs to be addressed. The full scale range of the sensor is to be ±2g,
which is reasonable for the ground motion expected from a large nearby earthquake. This is
described as “Sensitivity” in the guidelines, but that term better describes how small a
difference in acceleration that can be detected. It goes on to discuss the RMS noise of the
system being less than 40µg (the smallest signal level clearly visible). Using a 16-bit ADC as
specified gives only ±32768 counts of resolution (<96dB) in the recorder. Assuming you have a
±2g range sensor, that means that 1 count (the sensitivity/resolution of the 16-bit recorder)
would be equal to 61µg, so a 16-bit system cannot mathematically achieve the noise level
specified, even assuming there is no bit-level noise (which there always is).

With each step in the data being this large, there is insufficient resolution for analysis of
structural response. Any modern scientific seismograph will be using 24-bit or 32-bit ADCs
with at least 130dB of dynamic range, and with a high sensitivity accelerometer the system can
achieve a real-world noise level of around ±1µg while still being able to achieve a ±2g full scale
range. This quality of instrumentation is required for structural monitoring so that the natural
frequency and modal response of the building can be determined. Any system using MEMS
technology accelerometers must be ruled out – even the best MEMS sensors have a noise level
almost 10 times higher than the required 40µg, they have limited dynamic range (<100dB), and
they are particularly poor at low frequency response – an important factor for high rise
buildings that generally have long natural period response.
The main aim of all of this building monitoring is to rapidly assess the health of the building
after a significant earthquake. With hundreds, possibly thousands of buildings requiring rapid
assessment, collecting data manually will be a slow, possibly difficult process due to
other emergency actions that may be operating at the same time. It would make sense to have
building response data readily accessible to structural engineers so that they can rapidly assess
buildings from central control centres. Adding data telemetry to modern accelerographs is a
relatively low cost component (a cellular modem) with a small ongoing operating cost (a
monthly data plan), so centralised data recording should be considered. Perhaps certain
sectors of each city can share data centres to allow the work of building assessment to be
spread among the available experts.

The guidelines are a huge step towards improving earthquake engineering knowledge, and
with a few minor modifications I believe the program will produce a rich data set that will be of
great value to seismologists and civil engineers for many years to come, and provide systems
that will be of practical use in emergency situations.

wireless network protocols are used to define or standardize the

rules and conventions for communication between devices

In order to monitor the health of a structure a structural health monitoring system must be
implemented to fully understand how the structure in question is responding to various loading
conditions and determine whether it is susceptible to failure.

The potential failure of structures is a major concern for any society. The impact of structural

failure can have large economic and public safety consequences. SHM systems can provide a sensible
way to prevent failure. Another important need for SHM is to fully understand how a structure will
respond to natural or man-made disasters.

4. Sensors There are a wide variety of sensors that can be used for structural health monitoring and this

section is devoted to exploring a good number of them to truly understand there uses and whether or
not they would be feasibly for a small scale system design such as this project. Some of the sensors
won’t be considered based on their application but it is still beneficial to understand them and how they
could be used on a larger scale project.

4.2 Accelerometers Another typical sensor used for a structural health monitoring system is the
accelerometer.

According to Dimension Engineering; “An accelerometer is an electromechanical device that will

measure acceleration forces. These forces may be static, like the constant force of gravity pulling at your
feet, or they could be dynamic - caused by moving or vibrating the accelerometer”
(DimensionEngineering.com).

An accelerometer is used by engineers in a SHM system by understanding how the bridge is reacting
under dynamic loads and more commonly used to analyze the effects of vibration on the structure.
The way a typical accelerometer works is by the effect vibrations have on a piezoelectric material. When
vibrations act on this piezoelectric material, it causes the material to “squeeze” which releases an
electrical signal which is directly proportional to the forces acting on the structure (Reference). By
understanding how forces are acting on a structure, it can help predict different modes of failures and
also were certain bridges need repairs or remolding.

5. Data Acquisition & Transmission Data acquisition devices act as the middleman between sensors and
computers. The way data

acquisition occurs in a structural health monitoring system is by capturing the signals produced by a
sensor and then converting that signal into data which in turn is transmitted to an offsite computer.

For a small scale system such as the one develop for this project, the transmission of data is

quite simple, with the data acquisition system being connected to a computer and then the data being
processed with a simple program.

Configuration of a data acquisition and transmission system (DATS) in a long-term bridge monitoring
system is generally much more complicated. It usually consists of local cabling network, stand-alone
data acquisition units (DAUs) or substations, and global cabling network. The local cabling network
refers to the cables connecting the distributed sensors to the individual DAUs, and the global cabling
network refers to the cables connecting the DAUs to central database servers (Xia, 2012).

The way a data acquisition system is setup is a vital part of the design process. If certain parameters are
not met then the quality of data being transmitted will not be adequate enough for processing. To
insure the quality of the data being transmitted then you must consider the compatibility between the
sensors and DATS, the distance between sensors and DATS, and also the quality of the hardware being
used. All of these plat a vital role in the quality of data acquired. The figure below demonstrates the
relationship between sensors, DATS and data collection.

5.1 Data Processing Once the data acquisition system has been tested on is functioning properly then
data

processing begins. Data processing is a critical step in a structural health monitoring system because it
provides the process data to be complied, stored and viewed.

The functions of the data processing and control system include: 1) control and display of the operation
of the data acquisition system; 2) pre-processing of the raw signals received from the data acquisition
system; 3) data archive into a database or storage media; 4) post-processing of the data; and 5) viewing
the data (Xia, 2012).

This data once processed will be the results of the structural health monitoring system and will provide
pivotal information about the health of the bridge structure. This information will also be further
analyzed and coupled with design and structural analysis data, to determine critical points in the
structure, damage occurred in the structure, and also potential points of failure. The figure on the next
page is a flow chart that demonstrates how data is used throughout a structural health monitoring
system.
Choosing and maintaining a proper network topology play important roles in improving network
performance.