Optimal Sensor Placement Method Considering the Importance of Structural Performance Degradation for the Allowable Loadings for Damage Identification

Considering the importance of damage for the structural performance and for decreasing the identification error, this paper proposes an optimal sensor placement method based on a weighted standard deviation norm (WSDN) index. The standard deviation of the identified damage parameters is solved using the series expansion theory and probabilistic method to quantify the effect of a measurement error on damage identification. The damage estimation weight (DEW) index, which can reflect the importance of each element in the structural capabilities, is established based on a performance-damage curve. A significant DEW for a specified element indicates that the element is important for the structure and that its identification error should be small. The WSDN index is obtained from the Hadamard product of the standard deviations (SDs) and DEWs. Thus, the identification error of the entire structure is measured using the weighting coefficient. The optimal sensor placement (OSP) procedure is performed by minimizing the WSDN index. The proposed method can clearly decrease the uncertainties of the identification results for the important elements. Other OSP criteria, including the condition number, information entropy, and standard deviation norm, which aim to decrease the identification error, are discussed in this paper for comparison with the proposed method. Two numerical examples and an experiment, which pertain to the deformation performance, buckling features, and dynamic characteristics, are discussed to verify the advantages of the proposed method.