Identification of possible structural defects on piled foundations supporting structures on permafrost soils: Norilsk’s Palace of Culture case study

For the safe operation of buildings and engineering structures, and for carrying out restoration work, it is necessary to monitor their technical condition. This paper presents a developed method based on extraction of standing waves from seismoacoustic noise, demonstrating the possibilities of using passive seismic for examining fixity conditions of foundation piles’ and determining its sections characterized by a relative increase in stresses using the Palace of Culture (Norilsk) building as the case study. The standing waves were extracted from the recorded acoustic noise by the accumulation of amplitude spectra of a large number of noise recordings. It is shown that the amplitude spectra can be used to reliably determine the fixity condition of foundation piles. The obtained field experiments results are qualitatively consistent with the results of the computer simulation by the finite element method both for individual piles and for the detected foundation anomalies.