OPTIMAL SENSOR PLACEMENT FOR DAMAGE DETECTION OF DISTRIBUTED-PARAMETER STRUCTURES BASED ON INFORMATION ENTROPY

The number of sensors and the corresponding locations are very important for the success of structural health monitoring (SHM) using vibration data. Most works related to the optimal sensor placement (OSP) problem in the literature are based on discrete-coordinate systems which are usually modelled by the finite element (FE) method. Although FE method can provide a convenient and practical approach to the dynamic response analysis of arbitrary structures, the solutions obtained can only approximate their actual dynamic behaviour because the motions are only represented by a limited number of displacement coordinates, where the sensors are confined to be put. For structures having typical distributed properties, it’s more reasonable and accurate to be modelled as distributed-parameter system with analytical formulation. Furthermore, although much attention has been paid to the OSP problem in various fields, such as modal testing and model parameters updating, the particular purpose for structural damage detection has seldom been involved. The main purpose of this paper is to develop an effective methodology for investigating the OSP problem for distributed-parameter system based on the information entropy for the damage detection purpose. Where, the information entropy is employed as a measure to quantify th