Rate-based structural health monitoring using permanently installed sensors

Permanently installed sensors are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, facilitating very frequent in situ measurements and consequently improved monitoring of ‘trends’ in the observed system behaviour. It is proposed that this newly available data may be used to provide prior warning and forecasting of critical events, particularly system failure. Numerous damage mechanisms are examples of positive feedback; they are ‘self-accelerating’ with an increasing rate of damage towards failure. The positive feedback leads to a common time-response behaviour which may be described by an empirical relation allowing prediction of the time to criticality. This study focuses on Structural Health Monitoring of engineering components; failure times are projected well in advance of failure for fatigue, creep crack growth and volumetric creep damage experiments. The proposed methodology provides a widely applicable framework for using newly available near-continuous data from permanently installed sensors to predict time until failure in a range of application areas including engineering, geophysics and medicine.