Issues in structural health monitoring employing smart sensors

Abstract

Smart sensors densely distributed over structures can provide rich information for structural monitoring using their onboard wireless communication and computational capabilities. However, issues such as time synchronization error, data loss, and dealing with large amounts of harvested data have limited the implementation of full-fledged systems. Limited network resources (e.g. battery power, storage space, bandwidth, etc.) make these issues quite challenging. This paper first investigates the effects of time synchronization error and data loss, aiming to clarify requirements on synchronization accuracy and communication reliability in SHM applications. Coordinated computing is then examined as a way to manage large amounts of data.