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Description
Inverse problems are central to modern Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), where the health state of a structure must be inferred from measured responses and the onset of damage must be promptly identified. In this context, increasing attention has been devoted to real-time SHM strategies, particularly in view of Digital Twin (DT) applications for remote structural monitoring.
Within DT-enabled SHM, shape sensing is a key capability. Among available approaches, the inverse Finite Element Method (iFEM) has emerged as a highly accurate strategy for reconstructing full-field structural displacements from strain measurements. However, this accuracy typically requires dense back-to-back sensor layouts, which are often difficult to implement in practical applications. Two complementary strategies mitigate this limitation: the Single Sensor Based (SSB) iFEM, which enables single-sided sensor configurations, and the Modal Virtual Sensor Expansion (MVSE), a strain pre-extrapolation technique that generates virtual strain sensors data.
Recent real-time monitoring experimental applications have shown that iFEM can effectively support DT implementations. Nevertheless, iFEM alone addresses the shape-sensing task only. To endow an iFEM-based DT with SHM functionality, it must be integrated with a damage identification procedure. To address this gap, this work presents an experimental application on a thin-walled C-section beam instrumented with a single-sided sensor configuration. Real and MVSE-expanded strain data are combined to feed SSB-iFEM and perform real-time monitoring. In parallel, a damage identification procedure is implemented using MVSE-reconstructed strains.
The proposed framework demonstrates that the integration of MVSE, SSB-iFEM, and a damage identification procedure is a practical SHM strategy for real-time applications, enabling DT-based monitoring with a reduced number of sensors.