Open Access

ARTICLE

Development of a Portable Integrated Wireless Sensor Module for Structural Damage Monitoring

by Ramana M. Pidaparti¹, Ashwin Belle², Ju Wang³

1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia 23284
2 Department of Computer Science, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia 23284
3 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Virginia State University, Petersburg, Virginia 23806

Structural Durability & Health Monitoring 2009, 5(4), 295-310. https://doi.org/10.3970/sdhm.2009.005.295

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a portable integrated wireless sensor module with video camera and ultrasound capabilities to monitor and investigate corrosion damage "in" structures. There are many studies in the literature on structural health monitoring with various sensors systems. However, very few of them utilize low power devices with reliable wireless communication capability to support data-intensive sensing which is a critical issue for practical applications. In this study, we developed a wireless sensor module with video camera capabilities and integrated it with a damage analysis module to investigate the damage of a structure. The module provides an open interface design which allows different physical sensors to be plugged into the existing software and hardware stack. It's high speed flexible networking layer allows stand-alone as well as networked sensing. The preliminary results indicate that the developed system can be scaled up to monitor structural damage in infrastructural systems.

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