Optimal sensor placement using FRFs-based clustering method

The purpose of this work is to develop an optimal sensor placement method by selecting the most relevant degrees of freedom as actual measure position. Based on observation matrix of a structure׳s frequency response, two optimal criteria are used to avoid the information redundancy of the candidate degrees of freedom. By using principal component analysis, the frequency response matrix can be decomposed into principal directions and their corresponding singular. A relatively small number of principal directions will maintain a system׳s dominant response information. According to the dynamic similarity of each degree of freedom, the k-means clustering algorithm is designed to classify the degrees of freedom, and effective independence method deletes the sensors which are redundant of each cluster. Finally, two numerical examples and a modal test are included to demonstrate the efficient of the derived method. It is shown that the proposed method provides a way to extract sub-optimal sets and the selected sensors are well distributed on the whole structure.