Flexible architectures for full-scale performance evaluation of tall buildings: Burj khalifa and beyond

Abstract

While the benefits of full-scale monitoring of civil infrastructure have been widely motivated, uptake and adoption within the building sector has been minimal due to a variety of practical barriers. These benefits are particularly noteworthy for the design, operation and maintenance of tall buildings, whose predicted responses are rarely verified by any formal feedback mechanism, despite their life safety and economic implications. This paper takes the first steps toward establishing these feedback loops and encouraging greater uptake by exploring the sensing architecture that was deployed in Burj Khalifa. Its modular hardware design and creative use of the building’s local area network delivered a plug-and-play solution. Units could be readily deployed by non-experts to measure the building’s accelerations and displacements as well as on-site meteorological conditions – encouraging local ownership of the system. These modules are coordinated by an on-site server, supporting efficient and scalable integration of a robust array of sensing modalities. The use of local servers overcomes many of the challenges of data acquisition in large-scale distributed sensing, while also automating data processing and web-based visualization. Given the growing emphasis on real-time displacement monitoring in tall buildings, the paper further explores how tiltmeters can be integrated into these modular sensor arrays to more effectively capture low-frequency displacements and the overturning action of core-based systems. The paper closes by considering how the development of modular sensing hardware for this signature application can be scaled to benefit a wider array of buildings. This democratization of sensing technology in the form of low-cost, re-deployable sensing modules can facilitate design feedback through community monitoring campaigns that directly engage building management as end users of this instrumentation, fostering uptake through exposure.