Ambient vibrations are mechanical low amplitude vibrations generated by human and natural activities. By forcing into vibration engineering structures, these vibrations can be used to estimate the structural dynamic characteristics.The goal of this study is to compare building dynamic characteristics derived from ambient vibrations to those derived from more energetic solicitations (e.g. earthquake). This study validates the efficiency of this method and shows that ambient vibrations results can be extrapolated to seismic behavior. Afterwards, this method has been used as a building damage estimate method after seismic events. First we applied this method in laboratory on structural elements (columns and beams) suffering damages. Then, we applied it on real scale buildings which suffered damages after the Boumerdes seismic event (Algeria 21/05/2003, Mw 6.8).Finally, a set of buildings located in Grenoble and Nice was tested. The correlation of the two main dynamic parameters (frequency and damping) gives us informations on the in-situ measured damping origin.These results show that the ambient vibrations method is efficiency for buildings dynamic characteristics estimate and seismic evaluation.
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