On-line response and damage estimation of a shear wall structure tested on a shake table using Bayesian filtering

This paper presents the application of a probabilistic method to estimate the complete dynamic response and state of damage of a large-scale structural system subjected to strong base excitations. The structure considered consists of a sevenstory slice of a shear wall building tested at the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation site at the University of California at San Diego. The acceleration response measured at limited locations is combined with a nonlinear model to estimate the complete dynamic response at unmeasured degrees of freedom. To improve the predicting capability of the mathematical model a subset of the parameters is jointly estimated with the response, a strategy known as joint state-parameter estimation or augmented state estimation. The estimated response is used to compute a damage index as a quantitative measure of damage.