Multi-type sensor placement and response reconstruction for structural health monitoring of long-span suspension bridges

This study is devoted to the experimental validation of the multi-type sensor placement and response reconstruction method for structural health monitoring of long-span suspension bridges. The method for multi-type sensor placement and response reconstruction is briefly described. A test bed, comprising of a physical model and an updated finite element (FE) model of a long-span suspension bridge is also concisely introduced. The proposed method is then applied to the test bed; the equation of motion of the test bed subject to ground motion, the objective function for sensor location optimization, the principles for mode selection and multi-type response reconstruction are established. A numerical study using the updated FE model is performed to select the sensor types, numbers, and locations. Subsequently, with the identified sensor locations and some practical considerations, fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors, laser displacement transducers, and accelerometers are installed on the physical bridge model. Finally, experimental investigations are conducted to validate the proposed method. The experimental results show that the reconstructed responses using the measured responses from the limited number of multi-type sensors agree well with the actual bridge responses. The proposed method is validated to be feasible and effective for the monitoring of structural behavior of long-span suspension bridges.