Multi‐level breakage‐triggered radio frequency identification‐based deformation sensor for rapid post‐earthquake loss assessment of buildings: Concept, development, and application

Structural components in a building are often enclosed by architectural coverings, which make it difficult to detect the damage levels of these components after earthquakes, because it is costly and time-consuming to remove the coverings. To rapidly detect the deformation conditions of the braces in a tension-only concentrically braced frame, a novel wireless radio frequency identification (RFID) based deformation sensor is presented in this paper. The battery-less sensor can be mounted on a steel plate brace, and when the largest elongation that the brace has ever experienced exceeds one of the preset deformation thresholds, the impedance of the RFID tag will change accordingly. In other words, the RFID tag can record the peak tensile deformation of the brace by changing its electrical state passively. In order to collect the deformation information of the key components of a structure after an earthquake, one only needs to carry an RFID interrogator/reader into the building and scan the RFID tags one by one in a contactless and non-line-of-sight way. Then, the damage levels are displayed in a building information modeling (BIM) software, and the collected information are further used to estimate the building losses automatically, which can help decision-makers decide whether to repair or to reconstruct the building. In this paper, a middleware was developed to enable the RFID reader to communicate with the BIM software. An experimental test was carried out to validate the sensor-reader-BIM system. A procedure for designing an optimal distribution of the deformation thresholds is also presented.