Settlement monitoring of a supertall building using the kalman filtering technique and forward construction stage analysis

Excessive and unexpected settlement of supertall buildings during the construction stage may affect structural safety. Floor settlement monitoring is imperative during the structural construction. The current practice is to measure floor settlement within a specific time frame and then compensate for the elevation error in the next construction stage. This posterior manner is inaccurate because it does not take account of measurement error and the real settlement in the next construction stage. This paper presents a Kalman filter based settlement monitoring approach with the aid of forward construction stage analysis. The settlement of floors in the next stage is predicted with the forward construction stage analysis. Consequently the elevation of the floor to be constructed can be pre-determined. The proposed method is demonstrated through construction settlement monitoring of the 632-m tall Shanghai Tower. The structure will be the tallest supertall building of China upon completed in 2014. It shows that this method can improve the accuracy of pre-determined elevation of supertall buildings.