Design of Wireless Sensor Network for Real-Time Structural Health Monitoring

During its whole service life, a building can be subjected to operational and environmental forces usually present, or to episodic seismic loadings (earthquakes). An automated smart building is a house capable of self-monitoring in order to signal the need of maintenance, when a reduction in performance levels is detects, or to signal the need of action if there are some structural problems. One of the most important issues in civil engineering is the detection of structural damages. The flexibility of the monitoring system is fundamental, expecially in case of existing buildings. For these reasons the adoption of wireless sensor networks with different nodes is desiderable in order to monitor conditions like seismic activity. This work propose a sensor node, based on ARM microcontroller, IEEE 802.15.4 wireless communication and GPS syncronization, for a wireless sensor network that solve a critical aspect in this kind of application: syncronism, when one has to collect dynamic input. Finally the paper shows the preliminary results obtained in laboratory.