Long-term monitoring of the distribution of a building's settlements: Sectorization and study of the underlying factors

Abstract

The monitoring of the structural behaviour of singular buildings and the environmental variables that affect them is an upward trend on a global scale. This paper presents a monitoring project of the building of the Institute of Technology (IT) of the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca, Spain. Different monitoring actions were carried out, specifically there were installed 27 measuring points of the soil water content (both outside and under the building), 4 clinometers with thermometers, a weather station, and 22 points for topographical levelling, thirteen of which are located on the footings of the building. Although 3 of the clinometers recorded data marked almost entirely by the evolution of the interior temperature, the one located in Module 4 showed a more complex behaviour. In order to determine the possible underlying causes of this behaviour, the footings were grouped according to the evolution of the settlements obtained by differential levelling. For this purpose, a novel clustering technique based on the calculation of the Jeffreys distance has been used instead of other more common dissimilarity measures. The analysis revealed a potential cause of the anomalous behaviour of a group of footings and permitted the study of the influence of temperature and other environmental and operative variables on this behaviour, allowing the detection of anomalies in the future. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd