Strain Field Pattern Recognition for Structural Health Monitoring Applications

Strain field pattern recognition, also known as strain mapping, is a structural health monitoring approach based on strain measurements gathered through a network of sensors (i.e., strain gauges and fiber optic sensors such as FGBs or distributed sensing), data-driven modeling for feature extraction (i.e., PCA, nonlinear PCA, ANNs, etc.), and damage indices and thresholds for decision making (i.e., Q index, T2 scores, and so on). The aim is to study the correlations among strain readouts by means of machine learning techniques rooted in the artificial intelligence field in order to infer some change in the global behavior associated with a damage occurrence. Several case studies of real-world engineering structures both made of metallic and composite materials are presented including a wind turbine blade, a lattice spacecraft structure, a UAV wing section, a UAV aircraft under real flight operation, a concrete structure, and a soil profile prototype.