Reliability Analysis of Residential Buildings Under Hurricane Using Embedded FBG Sensors: Remaining Useful Lifetime Analysis

Abstract

Every year, the lack of reliable and affordable structural health monitoring systems to assess the resilience of residential buildings in coastal areas results in extensive damage from strong winds and hurricanes. This work investigates the use of embedded fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors for the structural health monitoring of residential timber buildings for reliability assessment. The remaining useful lifetime (RUL) of buildings after being impacted by hurricane has been estimated using long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network. A proof-of-concept experimental setup has validated the system’s performance and functionality. Multiple one-story and two-story scaled-down (~1:20) prototype timber buildings were constructed and placed in a wind tunnel to assess their structural performance and stability under wind speeds ranging from 0 to 150 mph. FBG sensors attached to the buildings measured strain in real time. The measured strain data are used to estimate the building’s reliability. A mathematical Health Indicator is introduced to determine the level of structural integrity and health under varying load and structural conditions. The FBG sensors demonstrated accurate measurement and real-time monitoring of strain changes in selected structural elements during high wind speeds. Assessment results can inform condition-based maintenance, safety evaluations, and stability reports. Additionally, the system can issue real-time warnings for potential failures and damages, thereby enhancing the overall resilience of residential buildings.

Received: 27 September 2024 | Revised: 2 December 2024 | Accepted: 27 December 2024

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Author Contribution Statement

Abolghassem Zabihollah: Conceptualization, Validation, Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Yu Shi: Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization.