A wireless sensor network platform for structural health monitoring: enabling accurate and synchronized measurements through COTS+custom-based design

摘要

Structural health monitoring has long been identified as a prominent application of WirelessSensor Networks (WSNs), as traditional wired-based solutions present some inherent limitations such asinstallation/maintenance cost, scalability and visual impact. Nevertheless, there is a lack of ready-to-useand off-the-shelf WSN technologies that are able to fulfill some most demanding requirements of theseapplications, which can span from critical physical infrastructures (e.g. bridges, tunnels, mines, energygrid) to historical buildings or even industrial machinery and vehicles. Low-power and low-cost yetextremely sensitive and accurate accelerometer and signal acquisition hardware and stringent timesynchronization of all sensors data are just examples of the requirements imposed by most of theseapplications. This paper presents a prototype system for health monitoring of civil engineering structuresthat has been jointly conceived by a team of civil, and electrical and computer engineers. It merges thebenefits of standard and off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and communication technologies with a minimumset of custom-designed signal acquisition hardware that is mandatory to fulfill all application requirements.