Identification of yield drift deformations and evaluation of the degree of damage through the direct sensing of drift displacements

Summary Inter‐story drift displacement data can provide useful information for story damage assessment. The authors' research group has developed photonic‐based sensors for the direct measurement of inter‐story drift displacements. This paper proposes a scheme for evaluating the degree of damage in a building structure based on drift displacement sensing. The scheme requires only measured inter‐story drift displacements without any additional finite element analysis. A method for estimating yield drift deformation is proposed, and then, the degree of beam end damage is evaluated based on the plastic deformation ratios derived with the yield drift deformation values estimated by the proposed method. The validity and effectiveness of the presented scheme are demonstrated via experimental data from a large‐scale shaking table test of a one‐third‐scale model of an 18‐story steel building structure conducted at E‐Defense.