A sensor fault detection strategy for structural health monitoring systems

Structural health monitoring has drawn great attention in the field of civil engineering in past two decades. These structural health monitoring methods evaluate structural integrity through high-quality sensor measurements of structures. Due to electronic deterioration or aging problems, sensors may yield biased signals. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop a fault detection method that identifies malfunctioning sensors in a sensor network. This method exploits the autoregressive modeling technique to generate a bank of Kalman estimators, and the faulty sensors are then recognized by comparing the measurements with these estimated signals. Three types of faults are considered in this study including the additive, multiplicative, and slowly drifting faults. To assess the effectiveness of detecting faulty sensors, a numerical example is provided, while an experimental investigation with faults added artificially is studied. As a result, the proposed method is capable of determining the faulty occurrences and types.