Optimal Sensor Placement Algorithm for Structural Damage Identification

摘要

Background: Structural damage identification is a very important subject in the field ofcivil, mechanical and aerospace engineering according to recent patents. Optimal sensor placementis one of the key problems to be solved in structural damage identification.Methods: This paper presents a simple and convenient algorithm for optimizing sensor locations forstructural damage identification. Unlike other algorithms found in the published papers, the optimizationprocedure of sensor placement is divided into two stages. The first stage is to determine thekey parts in the whole structure by their contribution to the global flexibility perturbation. Thesecond stage is to place sensors on the nodes associated with those key parts for monitoring possibledamage more efficiently. With the sensor locations determined by the proposed optimizationprocess, structural damage can be readily identified by using the incomplete modes yielded fromthese optimized sensor measurements. In addition, an Improved Ridge Estimate (IRE) technique isproposed in this study to effectively resist the data errors due to modal truncation and measurementnoise. Two truss structures and a frame structure are used as examples to demonstrate the feasibilityand efficiency of the presented algorithm.Results: From the numerical results, structural damages can be successfully detected by the proposedmethod using the partial modes yielded by the optimal measurement with 5% noise level.Conclusion: It has been shown that the proposed method is simple to implement and effective forstructural damage identification.