Abstract:

A method of optimizing sensor placement in the structural dynamic test and localizing structural damage from limited sensor information in a structure is presented in this paper. The sensor placements are optimized according to the ability of collecting structural damage information for each degree of freedom (DOF) of the structure. Only a limited number of structural DOF including plentiful damage information are instrumented. Incomplete mode shapes yielded from these limited sensor placements are directly used to localize structural damage so that the incompleteness of experimental mode shape to block the development of structural damage detection is solved. Experimental research shows that the proposed method can be successfully used to localize single or multiple damages on the three dimension truss structure.

Key words: damage detection, vibration, modal analysis, system identification, optimal sensor placement