Design and installation of a permanent monitoring system for Palazzo Lombardia in Milano, Italy

This work describes the design and installation of a permanent system for the structural monitoring of Palazzo Lombardia Building in Milano. This is one of the high rise buildings (162 m tall) built in Milano in the last few years and is actually the seat for the regional government. A dynamic testing of the building was performed during the construction, highlighting the main vibration frequencies and the associated mode shapes. Now that the building is fully operational the public administration asked for the installation of a monitoring system in order to satisfy the following requirements: (i) monitoring the evolution of the dynamic parameters identified during the previous testing phase, (ii) monitoring the vibration to assess comfort and serviceability against the wind, (iii) monitoring the static behavior of Core 1 (tallest tower), (iv) having a continuous monitoring to capture exceptional events To this aim a continuous monitoring system was developed relying on high sensitivity pie-zo-accelerometers, low-noise high stability clinometers and a wind measurement station. The system has been installed and is fully operational since the end of October 2015. The system is described in details in this paper and the first results in terms of vibration and static behavior evolution are presented. Starting from these data a continuous modal parameter extraction will be developed and implemented.