Modal Sensitivity Based Sensor Placement for Damage Identification Under Sparsity Constraint

The present study deals with a comprehensive approach for damage identification of spatial truss structures. The novelty of the proposed approach consists of a three-level analysis. First, sensitivity of assumed modal characteristics is calculated. Second, natural frequency sensitivity is used to determine hardly identifiable structural parameters and mode shape sensitivity is applied to select damage-sensitive locations of sensors. Third, two sparsity constrained optimization algorithms are tested towards efficient identification of applied damage scenarios. These two algorithms are based on ℓ1-norm minimization and non-negative least square (NNLS) solution.Performances of both proposed algorithms have been compared in two realistic case studies: the first one concerned a three-dimensional truss girder with 61 structural parameters and the second one was devoted to an upper-deck arch bridge composed of 416 steel members.