The Guangzhou New TV Tower (GNTVT), currently being constructed in Guangzhou, China, is a supertall structure with a height of 610 m. This tube-in-tube structure comprises a reinforced concrete inner tube and a steel outer tube adopting concrete-filled-tube columns. A sophisticated structural health monitoring (SHM) system consisting of over 600 sensors has been designed and is being implemented by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University to GNTVT for both in-construction and in-service real-time monitoring. This paper outlines the technology innovation in developing and implementing this SHM system, which includes (i) modular design of the SHM system, (ii) integration of the in-construction monitoring system and the in-service monitoring system, (iii) wireless-based data acquisition and Internet-based remote data transmission, (iv) design and implementation of a fiber Bragg grating sensing system,(v) structural health and condition assessment using static and dynamic monitoring data, (vi) verification of the effectiveness of vibration control devices by the SHM system, and (vii) development of an SHM benchmark problem by taking GNTVT as a test bed and using real-world measurement data. Preliminary monitoring data including those obtained during the Wenchuan earthquake and recent typhoons are also presented. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Vibration-based methods are being rapidly applied to detect structural damage. The usual approaches incorporate sensitivity analysis and the optimization algorithm to minimize the discrepancies between the measured vibration data and the analytical data. However, conventional optimization methods are gradient based and usually lead to a local minimum only. Genetic algorithms explore the region of the whole solution space and can obtain the global optimum. In this paper, a genetic algorithm with real number encoding is applied to identify the structural damage by minimizing the objective function, which directly compares the changes in the measurements before and after damage. Three different criteria are considered, namely, the frequency changes, the mode shape changes, and a combination of the two. A laboratory tested cantilever beam and a frame are used to demonstrate the proposed technique. Numerical results show that the damaged elements can be detected by genetic algorithm, even when the analytical m...