The state of art of sensor placement methods in structural health monitoring

This paper presents an overview of current research and development in the field of sensor placement methods in structural health monitoring. Due to the limitations of equipment facilities and cost, the number of sensors to be installed in a structure is relatively few. In many cases, three are always degrees of freedoms in a structure are not easily accessible, or eventually inaccessible. Moreover, actual structures are all continuous and have essentially infinite degrees of freedoms, therefore, it is impossible to instrument on all the degrees of freedoms. The methods of sensor placement are mainly dealing with accelerometers for global dynamic testing, or structural health monitoring. Three major concerns are discussed, the necessary number of sensors to be installed, where to deploy these sensors, and how to evaluate the effectiveness of these deployed sensors. Finally, a new loading dependent sensor placement method is proposed, and verified by the experimental data of a simple cantilever beam structure.