A Modular, Wireless Damage Monitoring System for Structures

Monitoring the performance of civil structures has recently become an area of great activity in both the research community and public sector. With the significant negative impact that extreme events and long term deterioration can have on the built environment, monitoring of civil structures holds promise as a way to provide critical information for near real-time condition assessment. This information can be used in the prudent allocation of emergency response resources after earthquakes and for identification of incipient damage in structures experiencing long-term deterioration. There is an economic and societal need to improve the response and condition assessment capabilities immediately following earthquakes and to extend the useful life of current infrastructure. To meet this need, the research in this study aims to provide an information system, consisting of a hardware, software, and system level solution.

The vast majority of published work on monitoring civil structures has focused on developing algorithms to advance the detection and diagnosis of damage to structures. An equally important task is the establishment of a flexible hardware platform capable of near real-time data acquisition. Many of the existing monitoring algorithms and strategies assume a sophisticated hardware infrastructure. Such an assumption ignores the issues of up-front cost, cost to benefit ratio, system installation, and life-cycle operation and maintenance.

This study has developed an inexpensive and flexible instrumentation system based on embedded systems and wireless networks to meet the needs of the structural monitoring community. The approach has been to determine the desired qualities of a structural monitoring system and design the hardware and software to facilitate damage detection. The vision of this study is realized in the prototype Sensor Unit; a wireless, modular, and battery powered data acquisition device.