Development of an Off-the-Shelf Field Programmable Gate Array-Based Wireless Sensing Unit for Structural Health Monitoring

摘要

This paper presents the preliminary results of an investigation on the application of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to civil infrastructure health monitoring. An off-the-shelf FPGA development board available at a comparable price to microprocessor development boards is adopted in this study. Advantages, disadvantages, feasibility and design concerns when using such a reconfigurable hardware architecture for implementing algorithms for structural health monitoring in a wireless sensor unit are studied in a showcase of implementing Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in a wireless data transmitting setting.