DOI

https://doi.org/10.25772/5673-A795

Defense Date

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Electrical & Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Dr. Ruixin Niu

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to formulate and solve the sensor placement problem for damage localization in a sensor network. A Bayesian estimation problem is formulated with the time-of-flight (ToF) measurements. In this model, ToF of lamb waves, which are generated and received by piezoelectric sensors, is the total time for each wave to be transmitted, reflected by the target, and received by the sensor. The ToF of the scattered lamb wave has characteristic information about the target location. By using the measurement model and prior information, the target location is estimated in a centralized sensor network with a Monte Carlo approach. Then we derive the Bayesian Fisher information matrix (B-FIM) and based on that posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound (PCRLB), which sets a limit on the mean squared error (MSE) of any Bayesian estimator. In addition, we develop an optimal sensor placement approach to achieve more accurate damage localization, which is based on minimizing the PCRLB. Simulation results show that the optimal sensor placement solutions lead to much lower estimation errors than some sub-optimal sensor placement solutions.

Rights

© The Author

Is Part Of

VCU University Archives

Is Part Of

VCU Theses and Dissertations

Date of Submission

8-8-2019

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