A simple cluster based damage sensing method - for Structural Health Monitoring applications

摘要

The real virtue of a wireless sensor network is the fact that it is a new sensing paradigm offering distributed data processing capacity, which can be used for structural health monitoring. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an emerging field in civil engineering, offering the potential for continuous and periodic assessment of the safety and integrity of civil infrastructure. Using traditionally wired sensors to implement such a SHM system with a dense array of sensors is quite challenging because of the difficulties in deploying and maintaining the associated wiring. Dense arrays of low-cost smart wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have the potential to improve the quality of the SHM dramatically using their on-board computational and wireless communication capabilities. These WSNs provide rich information which SHM algorithms can utilize to detect, locate and assess structural damage. We have aimed at developing sensor nodes using LPC2148 micro controller and ZIGBEE as wireless transceiver. The sensor nodes are equipped with vibration sensing elements. Vibration data is continuously read at each sensor node, the ADC values at the sensor nodes are transmitted to the receiver node at the host computer. At the hub node the damage is detected and classified as normal and critical vibrations. Based on the minimum and maximum limit of vibrations of the structure the extent of the damage is found out. Knowing the node IDs we can determine the location of the damage.