Structural dynamics-based sensor placement strategy for high quality sensing

This paper presents a structural dynamics-based sensor placement strategy for improving the quality of data acquisition and consequently, the effectiveness of machine health monitoring. Based on vibration measurements on a realistic bearing test bed, signal quality at several representative sensor locations was compared using the structural nodal signal-to-noise ratio as a criterion. It was found that placing sensors closely to the machine component to be monitored has significant effect on improving sensing quality. Using one custom-designed and four commercial accelerometers, results from the numerical analysis were experimentally verified.