A method of optimal sensor placement based on data fusion

The optimal sensor placement is one of the most important contents of structural health monitoring study and is connected directly with the precision of the modal identification and the result of the model updating. In order to obtain the best information for the modal identification, the method of optimal sensor placement based on data fusion was proposed. With this method, the distance measure was used as the fusion level. Firstly, the synthesized support level of the proposed measured points was calculated through calculation of the distance measure matrix and the support level matrix; secondly, the optimal locations of sensors were decided according to the sizes of the synthesized support levels; thirdly, the method was proved to be effective through an example of optimal sensor placement on a space truss structure, where the peak value method was used to identify the natural frequencies, the identified frequencies of the selected measured points and the unselected ones were compared.