Optimal sensor placement for bridge damage detection using deflection influence line

Sensor placement is a crucial aspect of bridge health monitoring (BHM) dedicated to accurately estimate and locate structural damages. In addressing this goal, a sensor placement framework based on the deflection influence line (DIL) analysis is here proposed, for the optimal design of damage detection-oriented BHM system. In order to improve damage detection accuracy, we explore the change of global stiffness matrix, damage coefficient matrix and DIL vector caused by structural damage, and thus develop a novel sensor placement framework based on the Fisher information matrix. Our approach seeks to determine the contribution of each sensing node to damage detection, and adopts a distance correction coefficient to eliminate the information redundancy among sensors. The proposed damage detection-oriented optimal sensor placement (OSP) method is verified by two examples: (1) a numerically simulated three-span continuous beam, and (2) the Pinghu bridge which has existing real damage conditions. These two examples verify the performance of the distance corrected damage sensitivity of influence line (DSIL) method in significantly higher contribution to damage detection and lower information redundancy, and demonstrate the proposed OSP framework can be potentially employed in BHM practices.