A shape sensing approach for laminated plate through coupling isogeometric scaled boundary element with inverse finite element method

The inverse finite element method (iFEM) plays an important role in deformation monitoring of the laminated plate structure by using surface strain measurements, which is also called “shape sensing”. The standard iFEM needs to divide the plate structure into several inverse elements and deformation field of each inverse element is reconstructed based on the measured strain information of each inverse element. Further, the full-field displacements can be obtained by assembling the displacement matrix of the each inverse element. However, in practical engineering, due to the installation of electronic equipment, the surface strains of some inverse elements cannot be measured, which makes it impossible to establish the shape sensing model. To this problem, this paper proposes a novel shape sensing algorithm for laminated plate structure, where the strain sensors are not required to be installed in each inverse element. In this approach, the non-uniform rational B-spline basis functions are adopted for interpolating the kinematic variables, and the scaled boundary finite element method can transform the local into global displacement fields, where the laminated plate structure is discrete into the 2D in-plane dimension. A cantilever laminated plate is used as study cases. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately reconstruct the displacement field and the accuracy is with in 6%. Therefore, the established shape sensing model can be used as an efficient tool for deformation monitoring of the laminated plate structure in practical engineering.