Sensor Placement Methodologies for Dynamic Testing

Abstract

Two methods are presented for structural sensor placement. The first scheme selects the most linearly independent impulse responses at all candidate sensor locations from a Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure. The second scheme is based on a principal component analysis and iteratively removes sensors that do not contribute significant information to the Fisher information matrix. Furthermore, use of a model reduction criterion is proposed to address the optimality issue. Several sensor placement methods were implemented to compare results and were applied to an Euler-Bernoulli beam and a cantilevered frame structure. It is shown that the proposed frequency criterion appears to be a selective criterion for choosing optimum sensor locations. Finally, the optimum measurement locations from several of the methods studied yield acceptable results based on data from an experimental study on the frame structure.