Dissipated Energy Ratio as a Feature for Earthquake-Induced Damage Detection of Instrumented Structures

The paper proposes an energy-based damage feature to detect the presence of earthquake-induced structural damage in instrumented buildings. The proposed feature is a function of the ratio between the hysteretic dissipated energy and the total dissipated energy. The main contribution of the paper consists in deriving an expression to estimate the dissipated energy ratio from a measured vibration response at a limited number of degrees of freedom. The proposed methodology is successfully implemented in the context of simulated multistory shear buildings and in a real instrumented building during two independent seismic events; one where the building did not sustain damage and the other were significant damage occurred. In both cases the proposed methodology performed the correct diagnosis.