A Quantitative Basis for Building Instrumentation Specifications

A quantitative basis for key building instrumentation specifications—namely, sample rate, system resolution, and time synchronization—is established by quantifying the sensitivities of engineering demand parameters of peak floor acceleration and peak interstory drift to the errors associated with data acquisition. Details of the realistic simulation and digitization of structural responses are provided and automation of the seemingly signal-dependent procedure of high-pass digital filtering of relative displacements obtained by double numerical integration of accelerations is presented. Results from these studies, along with prior results from similar sensitivity analyses with respect to intensity measures of peak ground acceleration, peak ground velocity, and peak spectral acceleration, are used to recommend potential updates to structural instrumentation specifications of major strong-motion instrumentation programs.