Research on Optimal Sensor Placement Using Effective Two-Step Arrangement Approach

Optimal sensor placement method is very important in structural vibration test. This paper proposes an effective two-step arrangement method for sensors optimization, which is suitable for on-line monitoring scheme. In the first step, we calculate the utmost distance of sensors on a special structure by principle of elastic wave propagation and determine the preliminary number of sensors; in the second step, optimized sensors placement is ultimately determined by Effective Independence Driving-Point Residue (EI-DPR) method which uses the utmost distance above mentioned as a constrained condition. This methodology concentrates the sensor positions in the high energy content regions resulting in the sensors´ being quasi-uniformly spaced and symmetrically deployed. This paper also compares our new EI-DPR method of sensor placement with the two traditional methods under three different modal criteria. Finally we verify the two-step arrangement approach on an intelligent space truss as a numerical case. The results successfully demonstrated that the proposed method (EI-DPR) is an optimal method better than the other two traditional ones.