PI's: Tara C. Hutchinson, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine and Falko Kuester, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine
This small grant for exploratory research (SGER) is requested to take advantage of a unique opportunity to study the response of nonstructural systems assembled within a full-scale building structure. The proposed investigation has two primary objectives: (1) to characterize the seismic response of an important class of equipment and building contents and (2) to study the applicability of tracking the response of these rquipment and contents using arrays of image-based monitoring systems. An SGER is requested to provide the resources to outfit a number of rooms within the interior of the building with nonstructural equipment and camera arrays to assess performance of both of these systems. We hope the work conducted under this SGER will demonstrate the applicability of this idea for use in full-scale building structures and identify needed areas for further study in the image acquisition and analysis portion of the process. As such, data collected from the proposed field experiments will be critical for the development of a larger proposal using NEES equipment to investigate alternative computer vision and motion tracking algorithms to advance camera-based systems as an earthquake monitoring technology.
The building of interest is a four-story building located at 4827 North Sepulveda Blvd., Sherman Oaks, California (approximately 80 km from the UC Irvine campus). The building was damaged significantly during the 1994 Northridge earthquake and has not been occupied since this event. Through separate funding provided by NSF, Professor John Wallace will use the UCLA NEES Mobile Equipment Unit to conduct field vibration experiments on this structure. Planned vibration experiments include placing pairs of linear and eccentric mass shakers on the roof of the building and driving the structure in the two orthogonal directions. In addition, a pair of shakers will be used to impose torsional motions into the structure. While much emphasis is placed on studying the structural response of this building, this field project provides a unique opportunity to study the response of elements mounted inside of the structure as well.
