One major ambition in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is to develop the ability to detect, identify and localize damage as well as to predict the lifespan of civil structures (Worden et al. 2007). This would allow well-informed decision on whether to repair or to demolish these structures. The word monitoring in SHM brings up several frequently ignored questions: What type of sensors and accuracies are needed to monitor a given structure? Where are the optimal sensor placements? How many sensors are necessary? How to analyse spatially distributed hybrid measurements? Or, in short: What is the sensor configuration best suited for structural health monitoring? If these questions are not explicitly addressed, the usefulness of the measurement data for an evaluation is left to coincidence.
One major ambition in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is to develop the ability to detect, identify and localize damage as well as to predict the lifespan of civil structures. This would allow well-informed decision on whether to repair or to demolish these structures. We want to focus on the issues of detection and localisation of damage caused by material degradation within a slender beam - a structure that is often used as a construction carrier.