Data Collection Using Terrestrial Laser Scanners from the Shake-Table Test of a Full-Scale Reinforced Concrete Building

Shake-table tests of a full-scale 3-story reinforced concrete frame building were performed at the E-Defense facility (Miki City, Japan) as part of the Tokyo Metropolitan Resilience Project. Building data were collected before and after each shake-table experiment, using light detection and ranging (lidar) scanning technology. Three-dimensional point clouds were generated and processed to investigate the damage features that can be extracted, which are important for postdisaster structural assessment purposes. To this end, this paper discusses aspects pertaining to lidar data processing and registration, calculation of residual displacements and interstory drifts, and concrete cracking and spalling identification and measurement. Most notably, this paper deals with very large data sets, processed to extract structural response information at both global and local scales. Limited multiscale work has been done in the past, and the different sets of challenges that arise have typically been addressed separately. Evidently, this gap needs to be filled before lidar can be effectively used in the field for structural assessment applications. A series of examples in which lidar data are processed and analyzed to assess specific structural components is illustrated, showing that point cloud data can indeed be processed to obtain measurements of global residual drifts or of the extent of visible damage (e.g., crack width and spalling). Although preliminary in nature, the results presented in this paper indicate that collecting postdisaster data using terrestrial lidar scanners has the potential to contribute improving how buildings are assessed in the aftermath of seismic events.