Building Quakes: Detection of Weld Fractures in Buildings using High-Frequency Seismic Techniques

Catastrophic fracture of welded beam-column connections in buildings was observed in the Northridge and Kobe earthquakes. Despite the structural importance of such connections, it can be difficult to locate damage in structural members underneath superficial building features. We have developed a novel technique to locate fracturing welds in buildings in real time using high-frequency information from seismograms. Numerical and experimental methods were used to investigate an approach for detecting the brittle fracture of welds of beam-column connections in instrumented steel moment-frame buildings through the use of time-reversed Green’s functions and wave propagation reciprocity. The approach makes use of a prerecorded catalogue of Green’s functions for an instrumented building to detect high-frequency failure events in the building during a later earthquake by screening continuous data for the presence of one or more of the events. This was explored experimentally by comparing structural responses of a small-scale laboratory structure under a variety of loading conditions. Experimentation was conducted on a polyvinyl chloride frame model structure with data recorded at a sample rate of 2000 Hz using piezoelectric accelerometers and a 24-bit digitizer. Green’s functions were obtained by applying impulsive force loads at various locations along the structure with a rubber-tipped force transducer hammer. We performed a blind test using cross-correlation techniques to determine if it was possible to use the catalogue of Green’s functions to pinpoint the absolute times and locations of subsequent, induced failure events in the structure. A finite-element method was used to simulate the response of the model structure to various source mechanisms in order to determine the types of elastic waves that were produced as well as to obtain a general understanding of the structural response to localized loading and fracture.