Structural and seismic monitoring of historical and contemporary buildings: general principles and applications

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) indicates the continuous or periodic assessment of the conditions of a structure or a set of structures using information from sensor systems, integrated or autonomous, and from any further operation that is aimed at preserving structural integrity. SHM is a broad and multidisciplinary field, both for the spectrum of sciences and technologies involved and for the variety of applications. The technological developments that have made the advancement of this discipline possible come from many fields, including physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, but above all aerospace, civil, electronic and mechanical engineering. The first applications, at the turn of the sixties and seventies, concerned the integrity control of remote structural elements, such as foundation piles and submerged parts of off-shore platforms, but nowadays this type of monitoring is practiced on airplanes, vehicles spacecraft, ships, helicopters, automobiles, bridges, buildings, civil infrastructure, power plants, pipelines, electronic systems, manufacturing and processing facilities, and biological systems. This paper carries out an extensive examination of the theoretical and applicative foundations of structural and seismic monitoring, focusing in particular on methods that exploit natural vibrations and their use both in the diagnosis and in the prediction of the seismic response of civil structures, infrastructure networks, and traditional and modern architectural heritage.