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Page Revision: 2010/10/07 11:32

Using Wireless Sensor Networks for Structural Health Monitoring¶

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has long been identified as a prominent application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), as traditional wired-based solutions present some inherent limitations such as:

• Installation/maintenance cost: from experience, the installation time of a SHM system for bridges and buildings can consume over 75% of the total testing time, and the installation labour costs can approach well over 25% of the total system cost).
• Scalability: as the system scales grows, wired systems become difficult to manage and cumbersome to use. At some point, even with the necessary installation/maintenance cost is under budget, the system may not be feasible to implement due to its scale.
• Visual impact: tourism and leisure has become a major industry in the 3rd millennium and the “cultural” tourism has received increasing attention in the last decades. The need of preserving historical constructions is thus not only a cultural requirement but also an economical and developmental demand. Although, conventional systems visual impact, even when the system scale is very small, depreciates architectural details of structures and may additionally limit visiting periods from days to months, compromising economical revenues.
  

Moreover, there is a lack of ready-to-use and off-the-shelf WSN technologies that are able to fulfill some most demanding requirements of these applications, which can span from critical physical infrastructures (e.g. bridges, tunnels, mines, energy grid) to historical buildings or even industrial machinery and vehicles. Low-power and low-cost yet extremely sensitive and accurate accelerometer and signal acquisition hardware and stringent time synchronization of all sensors data are just examples of the requirements imposed by most of these applications.

This project has been addressing the design of prototype systems (hardware+software) for health monitoring of civil engineering structures, involving a multidisciplinary team from CISTER and ISISE.

We have been trying to merge the benefits of standard and off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and communication technologies with a minimum set of custom-designed signal acquisition hardware that is mandatory to fulfil all application requirements, proving that it is possible to satisfy highly demanding data acquisition, both in terms of sensitivity and time synchronization, necessary to complex SHM algorithms.