Displacement of a skyscraper using various types of field monitoring data

Structure health monitoring (SHM) systems generates huge amount of data. Utlilization and interpret of the data are critical for the structural performance evaluation. Various data fusion and data mining techniques have been proposed, whereas real applications are still limited. This paper demonstrates a new use of strain data for displacement calculation. Based on the beam bending theory, the transverse displacement can be calculated from the strain (or curvature) of the beam. When the strain data of different segments are available, the transverse displacement of the entire component can be estimated. The technique is applied to the Canton Tower (previously known as Guangzhou New TV Tower), on which a long-term health monitoring system including over 300 strain gauges at various heights has been installed. The calculated displacements under normal temperature action and typhoon action are compared with those using GPS and a good agreement is observed. Error analysis shows that the accuracy of this technique is about 1 cm for the Canton Tower.