Search for: All records

Tornadoes can cause severe damage to buildings, but it is difficult to measure tornado loading on structures due to limitation of equipment. To enable investigations of tornado effects on buildings, this paper presents a method that can be used to numerically simulate nonstationary, non-Gaussian tornado-like loading based on laboratory testing. An illustrative application shows that the proposed method can successfully simulate tornado-like loading that is statistically similar to the loading measured in experiments. 

Researchers have made substantial efforts to improve the measurement of structural reciprocal motion using radars in the last years. However, the signal-to-noise ratio of the radar’s received signal still plays an important role for long-term monitoring of structures that are susceptible to excessive vibration. Although the prolonged monitoring of structural deflections may provide paramount information for the assessment of structural condition, most of the existing structural health monitoring (SHM) works did not consider the challenges to handle long-term displacement measurements when the signal-to-noise ratio of the measurement is low. This may cause discontinuities in the detected reciprocal motion and can result in wrong assessments during the data analyses. This paper introduces a novel approach that uses a wavelet-based multi-resolution analysis to correct short-term distortions in the calculated displacements even when previously proposed denoising techniques are not effective. Experimental results are presented to validate and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm. The advantages and limitations of the proposed approach are also discussed.