Optimum sensor placement for structural damage detection

A method of optimizing sensor locations and detecting damage in a structure using the collected information is presented in this paper. Unlike most methods found in the literature, the sensor locations are prioritized according to their ability to localize structural damage based on the eigenvector sensitivity method. This is in line with the requirements for structural damage localization. Only a small subset of the total structural degrees-of-freedom is instrumented, and the incomplete modes yielded from these optimized sensor locations are used to localize structural damage. Numerical example and test results show that this approach is effective for detecting structural damage directly using optimum and incomplete test modes.