An overview of MEMSCON project: an intelligent wireless sensor network for after-earthquake evaluation of concrete buildings

摘要

Rapid advances in sensing and data transmission techniques, as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), lower power wireless networking and in computation give hopes for a new generation of small, inexpensive, networked sensors that can be distributed on civil and building structures to provide accurate, quantitative information on the structure's physical state while in service. This information can be used to assess the structural condition of the monitored facility and aid decision making on rehabilitation so that safety can be attained and rehabilitation costs can be reduced. The aim in EU-funded MEMSCON project is to develop MEMS-based sensors for construction monitoring and to integrate them with a Decision-Support-System (DSS) that will use the information from the above sensors to aid decisions on proactive rehabilitation and rehabilitation after earthquake damage in reinforced concrete buildings. Although Today the appraisal of the seismic damage is almost exclusively based on visual inspection, measuring quantitatively the response of buildings during and after an earthquake, in terms of acceleration of strain, is an easy task. However, the owners are somehow reluctant to install permanent sensing systems, both for the high costs of these devices and for the difficulty of interpreting the data. To overcome these limitations, MEMCON project aims to produce small size sensing node, integrating MEMS-based sensors and an RFID tag in a single package that will be attached to reinforced concrete buildings for life-cycle measurements of acceleration and strain that will be transmitted to a remote base station using a wireless interface. These nodes will lead to an economically sustainable industrial deployment. The DDS, an automatic evaluation software, will process the measurements and define the condition state, which particularly aims to the proactive rehabilitation and rehabilitation after earthquake damage in buildings. This DSS will accept input from the sensors in order to assess the structural condition of the monitored building and to select optimal remedial measures.