A smart system to determine sensor locations for structural health monitoring of ship structures

Utilizing the strain data collected from on-board strain sensors in order to solve the inverse problem of real time reconstruction of full-field structural displacements, strains, and stresses is known as displacement and stress monitoring. Displacement and stress monitoring is the vital feature for performing Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). An efficient algorithm called inverse Finite Element Method (iFEM) was recently developed for displacement and stress monitoring of engineering structures. Obtaining the surface strain measurements from the sensors placed on the optimum locations of structure is crucial in terms of the iFEM methodology. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to develop a smart system that determines the most appropriate and practical locations of the on-board strain sensors for SHM of ship structures. The system is developed by combining three different in-house software, hydrodynamic software, finite element software, and iFEM software. The following execution sequence is used. First, the hydrodynamic analysis is performed in order to find hydrodynamic ship loading and rigid body motion of the ship. Then, finite element analysis is performed to obtain structural response and simulated sensor-strain data. Finally, iFEM analysis is performed to reconstruct the three-dimensional global structural response by using the simulated strain data obtained from different number of strain sensors located at various locations of the structure as input. By utilizing the developed system, a long barge is analyzed and the optimum locations for placing on-board sensors are determined and discussed.