Structural Health Monitoring: Alarming System

Copyright © 2013 Adel ElSafty et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. There is a huge investment in our infrastructure that is vital to our social and economic life. However, the aging and deterioration of the structures require implementing a damage detection system to monitor their structural integrity. In this study, a new alarming system was developed as part of a structural health monitoring system and installed in a scaled-down structure models. The designed system incorporated microprocessors, wireless communication, transducer, and cellular transmission that allow remote monitoring. The developed system facilitates continuous monitoring process of any part of structures and controlled remotely from any location. The system was equipped with data processing subsystem that detects structural behavior irregularity, defects, and potential failures. The system was tested using Lin-ear Variable Differential Transformer (LVDT) for deflections and using strain gages to measure the developed axial and flexural strains in different structural models. Filtering algorithm was used to filter graphs and the data gathered in each loading stage was averaged and plotted to show the abrupt change in the values. The filtering system helps the alarming system to have a clear prediction of possible irregularities. The developed system provides the desired features of low cost, low power, small size, flexibility and easy implementation, remote accessing, early detection of problems, and simplified representation of the results