The MIT Green Building benchmark problem for structural health monitoring of tall buildings

This paper presents a benchmark problem for the structural health monitoring community to study tall buildings. The benchmark building is called the Green Building located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, with 21 stories above the ground (83.7m) and a basement (3.8m) connecting to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tunnel system. This building was constructed as cast-in-place reinforced concrete and instrumented with 36 accelerometers to measure the building translational, torsional and vertical responses. The benchmark problem includes the detailed description of this building, 7 field measurement data sets (4 ambient data sets, 1 data set under an unidentified event, 1 data set under the excitation of fireworks, and 1 earthquake data set), and finite element models (both full-scale and condensed models). The Green Building has an identifiable soil-structure interaction behavior and the base rocking movement brings significant components into the building response. To decouple the rocking effect, storey measurement condensation and rocking response determination are discussed in this paper. A blind source separation approach is finally applied to identify the modal characteristics and quantify the rocking components. The benchmark data and models are open to the public for algorithmic development and validation.