Development of a Compact Wireless Sensor for Aerospace Structural Monitoring

摘要

Wireless smart sensor technologies, which integrate sensors and microprocessors combined with wireless communication, have become increasingly vital in structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. However,conventional design of wireless sensor with low I/O throughput impedes their applications in high speed measurements, usually encountered in aerospace structures. In this research, a compact wireless sensor node with dimension 30mm×30mm×35mm composed of a number of stacked modules is designed, developed and tested using commercially available components. In contrast to wireless sensor prototypes explicitly intended for implementation in low frequency applications, the wireless sensor is designed to be capable of ultrasonic sensing such as acoustic emission and targeted for active diagnosis. Dual processor/controller architecture is realized by cooperating FPGA/MCU, high speed ADC, and SRAM together to achieve up to 10 MHz sampling rate.Laboratory experiments for verification are also given. The work shows that the wireless sensor can explore new applications at the opposite end of the spectrum from conventional applications: high-fidelity and high-speed data acquisition.