Structural Health Monitoring: a Quest towards the Use of Combined Approaches

Over the past number of decades the structural health monitoring (SHM) research community has developed and published a large variety and number of methodologies for the purpose of detecting and locating damage in a structure using sensor measurement data. While almost all of these methods have demonstrated some degree of success in detecting damage, different approaches have differing costs, and corresponding tradeoffs in performance. Typical costs include computational effort, the development of an accurate structural model, or the collection of a large volume of data. Whether or not these costs are worth the investment depends on the specific SHM scenario. In this paper we analyze four different SHM methodologies, including model-based and data-based approaches, outlining their individual strengths and weaknesses, tradeoffs between cost and performance,and suggesting appropriate application areas for each. The efficacy of the methods is evaluated using data collected from a steel-frame laboratory structure.