Efficient structural health monitoring by limited strain measurements

The structural health monitoring to large space steel structure has become more and more important and significant to monitor the performance, identifies the damage and assesses the remaining lifetime by the measurements of various kinds of sensors located in the structure. However, the acquisition method for the information of the behavior of the whole structure based on the limited measurements is still a challenge for the structural health monitoring. An approach for acquiring the whole structural stress distribution by limited strain measurements is presented in the paper. Firstly, the whole structure is divided into several substructures; secondly, the hierarchical clustering methods are used to make a decision on the number and the location of the sensors, while the fitting method introducing the definition of continuation is used to acquiring the stress distribution of baseline substructure and an amending method is used to acquiring the stress distribution of the other substructures; thirdly, the comparison of forecasting stress distribution and theoretical stress distribution from a numerical simulation example which is based on a real structure in Shenzhen of P. R. China shows that the stress distribution of the whole structure can be obtained from the limited strain measurements.