Structural monitoring system for the management of emergency due to natural events

The growing interest towards the use of permanent monitoring system is due to the importance of assessing the damage occurring on a structure after extreme events like earthquakes, typhoons or tsunamis, so that the expert authorities can provide the users and the owner with immediate information on structural safety. Last year, an experimental campaign has been presented in [1], regarding to a full-scale three-dimensional reinforced concrete frame in Italy, monitored over time by using different types of sensors to determine the structural displacements. This structure has been tested in laboratory under a sequence of earthquakes of increasing amplitude. The experimental results allow to conclude that, for seismic monitoring, the measurement system based on accelerometers is better when the monitored structure doesn´t exhibits residual displacements after the earthquake, while a vision measurement system is suited to estimatea possible residual post-earthquake displacement.