Self-Charging and Self-Monitoring Smart Civil　Infrastructure Systems: Current Practice and Future　Trends

摘要

Next generation of smart infrastructure is heavily dependent on distributed sensing technology to monitor thestate of urban infrastructure. The smart sensor networks should react in time, establish automated control, and collectinformation for intelligent decision making. In this paper, we highlight our interdisciplinary research to address threemain technical challenges related to smart infrastructure: (1) development of smart wireless sensors for civilinfrastructure monitoring, (2) finding an innovative, cost-effective and sustainable energy resource for empoweringheterogeneous, wireless sensor networks, and (3) designing advanced data analysis frameworks for the interpretationof the information provided by these emerging monitoring systems. More specifically, we focus on development of aself-powered piezo-floating-gate (PFG) sensor that uses only self-generated electrical energy harvested bypiezoelectric transducers directly from a structure under vibration. The performance of this sensing technology isdiscussed for different civil infrastructure systems with complex behavior. Subsequently, the proposed datainterpretation systems integrating deterministic, machine learning and statistical methods are reviewed. We outlineour thoughtful vision for the proposed framework to serve as an integral part of future smart civil infrastructure, whichwill be capable of self-charging and the self-diagnosis of damage well in advance of the occurrence of failure.