Displacement monitoring of a structure is very useful in many civil engineering applications, such as for everyday service loads, during extreme events, or to determine structural response to particular or increasing loads. Using sensors to measure the displacement directly can be expensive, time-consuming, and disruptive of the structure's use. An attractive method would accurately determine a structure's displacement using inexpensive sensors that do not disrupt the use of the structure. One possible approach is to measure the acceleration of the structure and then to estimate the displacement. However, it is well known that repeated integration of acceleration could yield large displacement errors due primarily to sensor noise. In this paper, an alternative solution is proposed: A signal model appropriate for the measured, dynamic accelerations that has the capability to reject noise, keeping only physically relevant accelerations. The displacements are directly estimated from the obtained acceleration signal model. Then a low-pass filter is applied to separate the static displacement from the dynamic displacements. All measurements are initiated with the structure at rest. Experiments with a physical beam verify that the method is robust and accurate.
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