Assessment of a structural health monitoring technique through synthetic data generation

Abstract

This work assesses the accuracy of a structural health monitoring (SHM) technique previously presented in the literature. The SHM technique under exam relies on a modal decomposition method and is intended to reconstruct the distributed deflection and strain fields from point-wise strain measurements at known locations. The objective of this work is to assess the reliability of such algorithm to variations of sensors number and their location. To this aim, the problem of a simply supported beam subjected to an impulsive loading is solved analytically and the results are used as synthetic input data for the SHM algorithm. The robustness of the SHM methodology has been also evaluated against erroneous choices of modal basis. Results show that sensors number and location play a primary role in the accuracy of the reconstruction, whereby the choice of the modal basis has a negligible influence on the results.