On improved fail-safe sensor distributions for a structural health monitoring system

Abstract Sensor placement optimization (SPO) is usually applied during the structural health monitoring sensor system design process to collect effective data. However, the failure of a sensor may significantly affect the expected performance of the entire system. Therefore, it is necessary to study the optimal sensor placement considering the possibility of sensor failure. In this article, the research focusses on an SPO giving a fail-safe sensor distribution, whose sub-distributions still have good performance. The performance of the fail-safe sensor distribution with multiple sensors placed in the same position will also be studied. The adopted data sets include the mode shapes and corresponding labels of structural states from a series of tests on a glider wing. A genetic algorithm is used to search for sensor deployments, and the partial results are validated by an exhaustive search. Two types of optimization objectives are investigated, one for modal identification and the other for damage identification. The results show that the proposed fail-safe sensor optimization method is beneficial for balancing the system performance before and after sensor failure.