Wall-slab joint parameter identification of a reinforced concrete structure using possibly corrupted modal data

In numerical models, the connections among component members are crucial for the prediction of structural behaviour under different types of solicitations. In reinforced structures, the connections are often assumed rigid, what may not be realistic in many practical cases. As alternative, a semi-rigid behaviour depending on a set of independent parameters can be proposed. In this case, a new difficulty arises, which is finding the appropriate values for those parameters. The present study proposes a numerical strategy for identification of the connection parameters based on the constitutive relation error (CRE). To include all available information, an augmented version (Modified CRE) is implemented. The parameters search is iterative and require large amount of system response analysis. To increase the computational efficiency, a reduced order model is adopted. The proposed approach shows low-sensitivity to limited lack of information and also to support condition variability, both of them verified numerically. In this work, experimental tests for a real 1:4 scale structure is utilized for finding the parameters corresponding to the first three modal shapes. A good agreement between numerical predictions and observations is verified, what highlights the accuracy and stability of the proposed numerical approach. The present study may also find applications in the domain of design of experiments.