Ambient Vibration Testing of a Super Tall Building in Shanghai

The Shanghai Tower is one of the super-tall buildings under construction in the world and will be the tallest structure in China after completion. The building stands approximately 632 m and has 128 stories. It was designed with a double curtain wall system, where a triangular outer facade gradually shrinks and twists clockwise at approximately 120° along the height of the building. On May 8th, 2015, an Ambient Vibration testing was performed on the building in its final stages of construction by a collaborative team from the University of British Columbia and Tongji University. The full-scale test had several purposes that included the evaluation of the current instrumentation techniques and the identification of the dynamic properties of the tower. A set of seven GPS-timed velocity/acceleration recorders was utilized, where two measurements were taken on almost every 15 floors in each setup. This paper presents the signal processing results by using the Frequency Domain Decomposition (FDD) and the Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition (EFDD) techniques. The most significant lateral and torsional mode shapes and associated periods of vibration were determined within the frequency range of 0.1–2 Hz. The results will provide useful information for further finite element model update.