Wind Driven Damage Localization in a High-rise Building

The size of high-rise buildings makes appealing adoption of ambient vibration as the excitation used in damage identification algorithms. The randomness of the source, however, makes quite challenging to evaluate the accuracy of the structural health assessment. The Interpolation Damage Detection Method (IDDM), based on the detection of reductions of smoothness in the structure's Operational Deformed Shapes (ODSs), has recently been applied to structures subjected to a known excitation. The focus of this paper is the extension of IDDM to the case of a structure subjected to an unknown excitation which, herein, is induced by wind. The algorithm is applied to a calibrated finite element model of a high-rise wall-frame building, lately designed to be built in Italy. The structural response of the undamaged and of the damaged structure to wind loading is computed with the numerical model, simulating damage through a reduction of the elastic modulus of the material of selected structural elements.