Smart Sensing Technology: A New Paradigm for Structural Health Monitoring

The computational and wireless communication capabilities of smart sensors densely distributed over structures can provide rich information for structural monitoring. While smart sensor technology has seen substantial advances during recent years, interdisciplinary efforts to address issues in sensors, networks, and application specific algorithms are needed to realize their full potential. This paper first reports on research that addresses each of these issues and then integrates this research to provide a new structural health monitoring (SHM) system that is suitable for implementation on a network of smart sensors. Experimental verification is provided using Intel’s Imote2 installed on a three-dimensional truss structure. The Imote2 is employed herein because it has the high computational and wireless communication performance required for advanced SHM applications. The efficacy of this SHM system is then demonstrated from sensing, network, and SHM algorithm perspectives