System identification of super high-rise buildings using limited vibration data during the 2011 Tohoku (Japan) earthquake

A new method of system identification of high-rise buildings is proposed in which high-rise buildings are represented by a shear-bending model. The method is devised to find the story shear and bending stiffnesses of a specific story from the horizontal floor accelerations. The special characteristic of the proposed method is to use a previously derived set of closed-form expressions for the story shear and bending stiffnesses in terms of the limited floor accelerations and to utilize a reduced shear-bending model with the same number of elements as the vibration recording points. In the proposed method, a difficulty of prediction of an unstable specific function in a low-frequency range can be overcome by introducing an ARX model. It is demonstrated that the shear-bending model can simulate the vibration records with a reasonable accuracy. It is shown further that the vibration records at two super high-rise buildings during the 2011 Tohoku (Japan) earthquake can be simulated with the proposed method including a technique of adding degrees of freedom between the vibration recording points. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.