Abstract:
Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a practical application of continuously recorded data from instrumented buildings. Past research has shown that environmental conditions such as temperature variation, humidity, wind, time of day and human activity can greatly affect the data and thus its usefulness of the data for subsequent analyses. This study analysed a year’s worth of instrumented building data from a building in the GNS building instrumentation programme, to quantitatively establish the influence of different environmental conditions to raw building motion (namely building acceleration amplitudes), as a precursor to understanding their effects on building characteristics predictions. The results indicate that there is no general correlation between mean building acceleration amplitudes with temperature and humidity variations. For the wind speed, there is a large amplitude fluctuation at low wind speed and that both the range and mean amplitude steadily decrease as wind speed increases. Furthermore, human activity significantly alters the nature of the recorded acceleration.
