Smart Sensor Networks for Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract

Condition based maintenance (CBM) concepts are widely used in the industry and are also applied to modern vehicles. Since structural components are becoming increasingly complex, e.g. due to lightweight composite materials, it is useful to apply CBM also to those parts. This requires the application of sensors to the components. The permanent instrumentation with systems for structural health monitoring is yet implemented for high performance structures, e.g. in military aircraft. Those rather expensive systems are not directly applicable to a road vehicle. This paper discusses ways to adapt the idea of structural health monitoring to vehicles using smart sensor networks, including signal processing, low-cost hardware platforms and energy supply of wireless sensor nodes.