Optimal sensor placement for monitoring structural vulnerable scenarios

A structural failure index consisting of vulnerability index and damage coefficient was defined in this paper, which could be used to evaluate structural failure state after the occurrence of vulnerable scenarios. The estimation error of this index which is always induced by modal uncertainties can be derived with the eigenvector sensitivity method. By minimizing the estimation error of the newly defined index for all vulnerable scenarios, a optimal sensor placement mathematical model is presented and the algorithm, based on convex programming, for solving the proposed optimization problem is explained. The procedure was illustrated with a numerical example of a plane truss, and the mean and variance of the structural failure index was calculated using the simulated modal data yielded from three different sets of sensor locations. The results show that when evaluating the structural failure state, more accurate result can be obtained with the proposed approach than the other two traditional approaches. © 2015, Science Press. All right reserved.