One year of continuous dynamic monitoring of a football stadium suspension roof: analysis of data provided by an autonomous monitoring application

摘要

In recent years, significant effort has been made to improve the assessment of the health condition of civil engineering structures by means of vibration measurements acquired in permanent monitoring. One of the main obstacles to achieve this goal is the development and implementation of an autonomous application which is capable of extracting relevant information out of the large amount of data collected continuously, regardless of the influence of the environmental effects (e. g. temperatures, wind, etc.). In this context, the present paper describes the most relevant results obtained along one year of permanent dynamic monitoring of a suspension roof. The monitored structure corresponds to the roof of a football stadium which is basically composed by two concrete slabs suspended by 34 pairs of full locked coil cables. The stadium is located in the city of Braga, Portugal, and its suspension roof has been permanently monitored by the Laboratory of Vibrations and Structural Monitoring (ViBest) of the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto (FEUP) since March 2009. After the installation of the monitoring system on the west slab, the dynamic properties of the structure have been automatically tracked with very few failures. Therefore, apart from describing the results obtained along one year of monitoring, this paper also outlines the major aspects concerning the tools which were especially created to automatically acquire and process the data, remove the environmental effects, and extract useful information to assess the health condition of the monitored structure.