An Efficient Sensor Placement Method for High-Rise Structures—A Case Study: The Canton Tower, China

Abstract

An actual problem that should be solved by the engineer in the construction and implementation of an effective structural health monitoring (SHM) system is where the sensors should be located. The research on the optimal sensor placement (OSP) is carried out on the Canton Tower, the tallest TV tower in the world. To avoid the intensive computationally demanding problem in the dynamic analysis, the three dimension finite element (FE) model of the Canton Tower is first simplified to the equivalent series multi-DOF system. Considering that the sensors can be physically arranged only in the horizontal DOF of the structure, but not in the rotational DOF, the new thought of taking the horizontal DOF as the master DOF and rotational DOF as the slave DOF, and reducing the slave DOF by the model reduction is proposed. Then, the calculating model after reduction is gotten by the comparison of the reduction results of different methods. Finally, the configuration of the OSP of the Canton Tower is obtained after analyzing the implementation process of a kind of generalized genetic algorithm (GGA) and performing the parameter analysis.