An Ideal strain gage placement plan for structural health monitoring under seismic loadings

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems can provide valuable information regarding the safety of structures during and after ground motions which can be used by authorities to reduce postearthquake hazards. Strain gages as a key element play an important role in the success of SHM systems. Reducing the number of required strain gages while keeping the efficiency of SHM system not only can reduce the cost of structural health monitoring but also avoids storage and process of uninformative data. In this study, a method based on performance based seismic design of structures is proposed for ideal placement of stain gages in structures. The robustness and efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated through installation of strain gages on an Airport Traffic Control (ATC) Tower. The obtained results show that the number of required strain gages decrease significantly.