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Flexible Architectures for Full-Scale Performance Evaluation of Tall Buildings: Burj Khalifa and Beyond

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Experimental Vibration Analysis for Civil Structures (EVACES 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering ((LNCE,volume 5))

Abstract

While the benefits of full-scale monitoring of civil infrastructure have been widely motivated, uptake and adoption within the building sector has been minimal due to a variety of practical barriers. These benefits are particularly noteworthy for the design, operation and maintenance of tall buildings, whose predicted responses are rarely verified by any formal feedback mechanism, despite their life safety and economic implications. This paper takes the first steps toward establishing these feedback loops and encouraging greater uptake by exploring the sensing architecture that was deployed in Burj Khalifa. Its modular hardware design and creative use of the building’s local area network delivered a plug-and-play solution. Units could be readily deployed by non-experts to measure the building’s accelerations and displacements as well as on-site meteorological conditions – encouraging local ownership of the system. These modules are coordinated by an on-site server, supporting efficient and scalable integration of a robust array of sensing modalities. The use of local servers overcomes many of the challenges of data acquisition in large-scale distributed sensing, while also automating data processing and web-based visualization. Given the growing emphasis on real-time displacement monitoring in tall buildings, the paper further explores how tiltmeters can be integrated into these modular sensor arrays to more effectively capture low-frequency displacements and the overturning action of core-based systems. The paper closes by considering how the development of modular sensing hardware for this signature application can be scaled to benefit a wider array of buildings. This democratization of sensing technology in the form of low-cost, re-deployable sensing modules can facilitate design feedback through community monitoring campaigns that directly engage building management as end users of this instrumentation, fostering uptake through exposure.

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Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Samsung Corporation (and a joint venture with Besix and Arabtec JV in collaboration with Turner Construction International) and Emaar Properties who have continued to support long-term monitoring on Burj Khalifa. The support of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) through Grants CMS 00-85109 and CMS 06-01143 that founded our full-scale monitoring programs in Chicago and scaled them to encompass Burj Khalifa. Of course, this work is only made possible through the collaborative efforts of my colleagues in the NatHaz laboratory led by Prof. Ahsan Kareem and assisted by Dr. Dae Kun Kwon, our new collaborations at the Center for Research Computing guided by Dr. Charles Vardeman, and the engineers at Samsung C&T under the leadership of Mr. Ahmad Abdelrazaq. I am also indebted to my former graduate students Jennifer Cycon and Jeff Loftus, who respectively assisted with the design and installation of the SmartSync modules on Burj Khalifa, and to undergraduate researchers Abelardo Corral, Eric Lifka, and Peter Rymsza and electrical engineering PhD student Michael McConnell who assisted with the fabrication and experimental validations of the new hardware platforms discussed herein.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences/Integration Lab, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Tracy Kijewski-Correa

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Andrew Bartolini

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  1. Tracy Kijewski-Correa
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Correspondence to Tracy Kijewski-Correa .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Structural Engineering, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

    Joel P. Conte

  2. Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Universidad de los Andes, Las Condes, RM - Santiago, Chile

    Rodrigo Astroza

  3. Department of Structural Engineering, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

    Gianmario Benzoni

  4. Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA), Zürich, Switzerland

    Glauco Feltrin

  5. Department of Structural Engineering, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

    Kenneth J. Loh

  6. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA

    Babak Moaveni

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Kijewski-Correa, T., Bartolini, A. (2018). Flexible Architectures for Full-Scale Performance Evaluation of Tall Buildings: Burj Khalifa and Beyond. In: Conte, J., Astroza, R., Benzoni, G., Feltrin, G., Loh, K., Moaveni, B. (eds) Experimental Vibration Analysis for Civil Structures. EVACES 2017. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering , vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67443-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67443-8_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67442-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67443-8

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