Integrating hybrid piezoelectric actuators with a single fiber Bragg grating sensor for online monitoring of structures

•Isotropic structures were examined using a two-step experimental and numerical guided waves-based structural health monitoring (SHM) method using FBG sensor.•The use of an improved cosine distance (CD) formulation to study the GW signals, helped to overcome the directional sensitivity of the FBG sensors.•Improved Sectorial elliptical code (SEC) effectively localized multiple damages from the experimental and numerical data within and outside the sensor network.•Automated Matlab-FEM code reduced the calculation time drastically.