Monitoring the vibration performance of structures for serviceability assessment purposes usually requires a deployment of several weeks or months to collect a dataset allowing a reliable assessment. Since for this type of medium term deployments installation costs are a key factor, wireless monitoring with its fast deployment has an advantage over wired monitoring systems. This paper describes a deployment of a wireless monitoring system on a timber footbridge. The goal of the monitoring was to provide information about vibration amplitudes during operation and to track changes of relevant natural frequencies with the temperature. Accelerations were permanently recorded and the acquired data was processed in the nodes to compute the envelope of the vibration amplitude and the dominant peaks of the Fourier spectrum. The wireless monitoring system that was deployed for one year provided accurate data matching the requirements of vibration performance assessments. The deployment demonstrated that a wireless sensor network is a technically feasible and economically effective mean to monitor the vibration performance of a structure.
Structural health monitoring with wireless sensor networks has received much attention in recent years due to the ease of sensor installation and low deployment and maintenance costs. However, sensor network technology needs to solve numerous challenges in order to substitute conventional systems: large amounts of data, remote configuration of measurement parameters, on-site calibration of sensors and robust networking functionality for long-term deployments. We present a structural health monitoring network that addresses these challenges and is used in several deployments for monitoring of bridges and buildings. Our system supports a diverse set of sensors, a library of highly optimized processing algorithms and a lightweight solution to support a wide range of network runtime configurations. This allows flexible partitioning of the application between the sensor network and the backend software. We present an analysis of this partitioning and evaluate the performance of our system in three experimental network deployments on civil structures.
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