• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제21권4호
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• pp.407-420
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• 2018

In structural health monitoring, it is meaningful to comprehensively utilize accelerometers and strain gauges to obtain the modal information of a structure. In this paper, a modal estimation theory is proposed, in which the displacement modes of the locations without accelerometers can be estimated by the strain modes of selected strain gauge measurements. A two-stage sensor placement method, in which strain gauges are placed together with triaxial accelerometers to obtain more structural displacement mode information, is proposed. In stage one, the initial accelerometer locations are determined through the combined use of the modal assurance criterion and the redundancy information. Due to various practical factors, however, accelerometers cannot be placed at some of the initial accelerometer locations; the displacement mode information of these locations are still in need and the locations without accelerometers are defined as estimated locations. In stage two, the displacement modes of the estimated locations are estimated based on the strain modes of the strain gauge locations, and the quality of the estimation is seen as a criterion to guide the selection of the strain gauge locations. Instead of simply placing a strain gauge at the midpoint of each beam element, the influence of different candidate strain gauge positions on the estimation of displacement modes is also studied. Finally, the modal assurance criterion is utilized to evaluate the performance of the obtained multitype sensor placement. A bridge benchmark structure is used for a numerical investigation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multitype sensor placement method.