Design and validation of wireless acceleration sensor network for structural health monitoring

0IntroductionCivil engineeringstructures suffer damages caused byenvironmental loads,fatigue,caustic effect and materialaging;thus,their strength reduces inevitably during theservice time.In order to assess these damages and makeappropriate decisions to keep the structures in good ser-vice,itis essential toimplement a damage detectionstrat-egy,and the process is referred to as structural healthmonitoring(SHM)1].In an SHMsystem,a set of sen-sors are mountedinstructuresto measurethe structure…

Design and validation of wireless acceleration sensor network for structural health monitoring

A wireless sensor network is proposed to monitor the acceleration of structures for the purpose of structural health monitoring of civil engineering structures. Using commercially available parts, several modules are constructed and integrated into complete wireless sensors and base stations. The communication protocol is designed and the fusion arithmetic of the temperature and acceleration is embedded in the wireless sensor node so that the measured acceleration values are more accurate. Measures are adopted to finish energy optimization, which is an important issue for a wireless sensor network. The test is performed on an offshore platform model, and the experimental results are given to show the feasibility of the designed wireless sensor network.