Vibration monitoring of stadia grandstands: real-time and long-term approaches

The dynamic behaviour and serviceability of stadium grandstands during events are critical concerns, especially for aging structures and modern lightweight designs. This paper presents a comprehensive study of the real-time and long-term vibration monitoring system implemented at the Giuseppe Meazza Stadium in Milan. The primary objectives of this work are twofold: first, to describe the real-time monitoring system capable of providing immediate assessments during events such as concerts and football matches; and second, to explore the extensive database of vibration data collected during 41 concerts held in the Meazza Stadium during the last years. Recently, the system has been updated to include an online component that checks in real-time the vibration levels achieved during concerts or football matches. This allows to evaluate the grandstand behaviour also in case of short-term and extreme events. In the first part of the paper, particular emphasis is on the challenges related to the data acquisition strategies, distributed processing, data synchronization and transfer. In addition, the study delves into the long-term analysis of the extensive vibration data database, employing synthetic representation techniques to identify critical events and trends related to various types of excitations. This dual approach not only demonstrates the effectiveness of the monitoring system in capturing real-time data but also showcases its capability in distinguishing between different excitation sources and pinpointing significant events over the long term, in a large and always-growing database.