Structural Health Monitoring System With Narrowband IoT and MEMS Sensors

Abstract

Monitoring of civil infrastructures is critically needed to track aging, damages and ultimately to prevent severe failures which can endanger many lives. The ability to monitor in a continuous and fine-grained fashion the integrity of a wide variety of buildings, referred to as structural health monitoring, with low-cost, long-term and continuous measurements is essential from both an economic and a life-safety standpoint. To address these needs, we propose a low-cost wireless sensor node specifically designed to support modal analysis over extended periods of time with long-range connectivity at low power consumption. Our design uses very cost-effective MEMS accelerometers and exploits the Narrowband IoT protocol (NB-IoT) to establish long-distance connection with 4G infrastructure networks. Long-range wireless connectivity, cabling-free installation and multi-year lifetime are a unique combination of features, not available, to the best of our knowledge, in any commercial or research device. We discuss in detail the hardware architecture and power management of the node. Experimental tests demonstrate a lifetime of more than ten years with a 17000 mAh battery or completely energy-neutral operation with a small solar panel (60 mm x 120 mm). Further, we validate measurement accuracy and confirm the feasibility of modal analysis with the MEMS sensors: compared with a high-precision instrument based on a piezoelectric transducer, our sensor node achieves a maximum difference of 0.08% at a small fraction of the cost and power consumption.

Development of a wireless, non-intrusive, MEMS-based pressure and acoustic measurement system for large-scale operating wind turbine blades

“…In general, recent developments in electronics, wireless communication and MEMS 1 sensors are making it possible to acquire data in a cost-effective and energy-efficient way. Novel IoT 2 sensors are enabling some new and important research areas for many applications, including Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and predictive maintenance (Di Nuzzo et al, 2021;Chen et al, 2021). SHM aims to detect anomalies and prevent apparatus faults (Chen et al, 2021;Qu et al, 2019) at low cost and connected to a long term vision of improving performance and/or reducing costs of a particular asset.…”

“…SHM aims to detect anomalies and prevent apparatus faults (Chen et al, 2021;Qu et al, 2019) at low cost and connected to a long term vision of improving performance and/or reducing costs of a particular asset. Previous analyses have demonstrated the potential of using inexpensive and low power MEMS sensors aerodynamic purposes (Fathima et al, 2021;Di Nuzzo et al, 2021). For example, arrays of MEMS barometers have already been deployed in other application scenarios, namely to aeroplane wings (Raab and Rohde-Brandenburger, 2020) and to cars (Filipskỳ et al, 2017).…”

“…In previous publications, a few examples of wireless devices have been proposed in the wind turbine context (Wondra et al, 2019;Di Nuzzo et al, 2021;Lu et al, 2019). However, they mostly support vibration measurements (Di Nuzzo et al, 2021;Esu et al, 2016) for SHM modal analysis, where the electronics have to process and transmit a data stream in the range of 5 kbps.…”

Aerosense: Long-Range Bluetooth Wireless Sensor Node for Aerodynamic Monitoring on Wind Turbine Blades

“…Non-intrusively measuring aerodynamic and acoustic data with minimal aerodynamic influence on blades is still an open challenge -the limitations for the form factor, power consumption and necessary data bandwidth require a highly optimized Internet of Things (IoT) system. Recently IoT wireless devices have been used more and more for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) to detect anomalies early on [7]. Moreover, in-field monitoring using distributed systems has also been investigated and deployed in previous publications [8,9,10].…”

“…Although previous studies [11,7] demonstrated the potential of using inexpensive MEMS (Micro-ElectroMechanical Systems) and integrated circuits (ICs) for SHM applications, no MEMS arrays of heterogeneous set of sensors are present in the literature, nor in commercial products, for in-field aerodynamic and aeroacoustic analysis on wind turbines. Arrays of MEMS barometers have already been investigated in several other case studies, where clusters of pressure elements have been embedded into surfaces, including airplane wings [12] and cars [13].…”