Seismic damage and loss evaluation in precast industrial buildings through low-cost accelerometers

Past seismic events, in particular the Emilia earthquake (2012), showed how the damage caused in highly industrialized areas could cause serious problems with large-scale economic effects. It is interesting to highlight how these effects are both immediate, due to the seismic vulnerability of old precast industrial buildings, and in the long term since the restoration operations are typically long due to the difficulty of assessing the real structural health state, particularly for the difficulty in reaching and inspecting components sensitive to damage, such as the connections. This work has the objective of finding a procedure, through relatively low-cost MEMS accelerometers, which allows to record and process the seismic accelerations experienced by the various structural elements. The paper considers the application of a procedure that allows identifying the state of health of the system through the application of damage indexes found in the literature and a first estimate of costs and recovery times to bring the building back to its pre-earthquake conditions. The procedure has been applied to a selected case study.