Multi-scale sensing for structural health monitoring

Structural health monitoring of civil infrastructure has traditionally used damage detection methods based measured vibration data. In most approaches, accelerations are used to extract the dynamic characteristics of the structure and locate damage. Acceleration measurements are often employed because they can be obtained conveniently and possess relatively little noise. This paper investigates the possibility using additional types of measurements to improve the accuracy and sensitivity of damage detection methods. A multi-scale approach is proposed to accommodate both acceleration and strain measurements simultaneously. Numerical simulations are conducted to verify the efficacy of the proposed approach.