Continuous mapping of deformation over a ship structure model based on pointwise measurements

. The development of structural health monitoring (SHM) systems on-board vehicles aims at achieving a full picture of the vehicle response under operating conditions. The use of different data sources is a key point for many SHM approaches which demand for extensive information and data fusion techniques to address the related inverse problems in a robust way. Therefore, a procedure to transform pointwise measurements into a continuous representation of the monitored structure is presented in this paper. To achieve the desired goal, a numerical approach able to combine experimental data and modelled responses is developed for 1D structures described by Timoshenko beam models, like, e.g., ships. A Proportional Observer (PO) and a Multi-Resolution Proportional Observer (MR-PO) are then built to evaluate the elastic deflection field over the structure in the points where no measurement is available, extending previous work on Euler-Bernoulli beams. Full-scale data from a 3D FEM model of an existing ship are used to obtain a simple uniform 1D model of an existing ship to illustrate the capability of the technique to track strains due to vertical bending