All mechanical structures are subject to deformation and cracks, due to fatigue, stress and/or environmental factors. It is therefore of uttermost importance to monitor the mechanical condition of critical structures, in order to prevent catastrophic failures, but also to minimize maintenance costs, i.e. avoid unnecessary inspections. A number of technologies and systems can be used for this purpose: among them, the ones proposing the use of wireless passive crackmeters have a strong impact potential, in terms of simplicity of installation and measurement and low cost. The present work hence shows a crack width wireless radio frequency identification (RFID) sensor, developed for applications on various materials (such as concrete and metal) and able to detect sub-millimeter deformations occurring on the object on which it is placed. A design method based on high sensitivity phase detection is shown.
The possibility to wirelessly monitor the state and the evolution of cracks is of increasing interest in emerging structural health monitoring systems. A simple and effective measurement method considers the placement of two passive radio frequency identification (RFID) antennas on top of the crack, so that the crack's evolution will produce a change of the inter-antenna coupling and in turn of the phase of the backscattered field. An ad-hoc design technique, based onto the coupled-modes physics, permits to maximize the sensor's sensitivity avoiding, or at least mitigating, the read range reduction during the evolution of the displacement that is instead typical of amplitude-oriented RFID displacement sensors. The proposed idea is demonstrated by numerical and experimental examples showing the possibility of sub-millimeter resolution with low-cost devices.
The structural health monitoring (SHM) of large and complex infrastructures as well as laboratory tests of new structures and materials resorts to strain gauge measurements to check mechanical stress. A wireless measurement of the strain gauge response is desirable in many practical applications to avoid the cost and the difficulty of wiring, particularly in large structures requiring several sensors and in complex objects where the measurement points are difficult to access. In this paper, a wireless strain gauge which is a hybrid between an RFID tag and a usual thin-film resistive strain gauge is experimented. Installation and maintenance problems of the wireless sensor networks are overcome allowing a high level of measurement accuracy, comparable to that of wired strain sensors, together with a long measurement distance. A large set of measurements has been performed using reference specimens and readings in order to validate the sensor and to develop a calibration procedure that makes the sensor suitable for a large number of different applications in civil engineering.
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