Due to current architectural trends, contemporary public buildings are becoming open-plan spaces with much less weight and damping. Consequently, Vibration Serviceability Limit State (VSLS) due to human-induced vibrations has become an increasing concern for structural engineers, especially when designing offices, hospitals, or gymnasiums. When dealing with resonant vibrations, a slight increase in the floor-damping enables decreasing considerably the vibration level. The damping strategy studied in this work is usually known in the literature as Constrained Layer Damping (CLD) and consists of a viscoelastic layer constrained between the concrete slab and the steel beam of a lightweight composite floor. In this paper, a complete structural checking methodology has been developed for analyzing all the limit states that determine the final sizing of a steel–concrete composite floor treated with CLD, including a detailed analysis of the VSLS. The methodology has been used for setting a structural optimization problem for floors with and without CLD treatments. Thus, it has been demonstrated that the integration of CLD treatments at the design stage of the building allows the development of lighter floor structures with a smaller embodied carbon (EC) footprint, especially for long-span schemes with restrictive vibration limitations.

Cables and tendons are crucial elements in bridge engineering but also are vulnerable structural elements because they are usually subjected to fatigue and corrosion problems. Thus, vibration-based non-destructive techniques have been used for external post-tensioning tendon assessment. Regarding continuous monitoring systems, tendon assessment is carried out through the continuous tracking of its natural frequencies and the subsequent estimation of the tension force, as this parameter is essential for the bridge’s overall structural performance, thus providing useful information about bridge safety. However, for long-term monitoring assessment, two main challenges have to be addressed regarding practical applications: (i) double-peak spectra and other spurious factors that affect the frequency estimation, and (ii) temperature dependency, which needs to be carefully treated since frequency/tension variation may be explained by temperature variation, thus masking potential structural anomalies. On this subject, this paper presents the experimental long-term monitoring of several post-tensioning external tendons in a high-speed railway bridge in which a sectorized weighted peak-picking frequency identification procedure is proposed for frequency estimation, alongside a cascade clustering process, which allows meaningful frequency estimates to be selected. Finally, the selected frequency estimates, which show variations from 1 to 2% for all analyzed frequencies, are used for the long-term assessment of the tension force.