A Case Study of Structural Health Monitoring by Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In this paper, an intelligent structural health monitoring platform is proposed with an example study of vibration signal detection on a multi-floor building. The platform is consisted of self-designed hardware devices and graphical user monitoring interface. In addition, the proposed framework is a three-layered architecture. Among them, the first layer is a wireless sensor network client which is deployed on the top three floors of a nine-floor building to collect vibrational data. The second layer is laptop computer which is connected with a master WSN node to collect the data sensed by slave nodes. All data packets will then be transmitted to master computer by laptop computer. The master computer plays the role of the third network layer and is responsible for post-data processing and signal monitoring. A testing experiment is also given to demonstrate the function of the proposed platform.