Monitoring Civil Structures with a Smart Wireless Sensor Network

Snehal S. Somwanshi, Balaji G. Gawalwad

A wireless sensor network was developed for structural health monitoring to effectively detect, locate, and assess damage produced by severe loading events and by progressive environmental deterioration. Structural response reflects the structural condition as well as the excitation force. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an active area of research devoted to systems that can autonomously and proactively assess the structural integrity of bridges, buildings, and aerospace vehicles. Recent technological advances promise the eventual ability to cover a large civil structure with low-cost wireless sensors that can continuously monitor a building’s structural health. The idea struck into mind that a SHM system should be implemented so that it can monitor structure (two story building) using different surface mounting sensors, these systems can collect various parameters of the structure. The rapid development of wireless sensor network (WSN) technology provides us a novel approach to real-time data acquisition, transmission and processing.This study introduces different approaches of SHM to monitor and measure the acceleration, strain, humidity and temperature of the building.