A wireless sensor network node designed for exploring a structural health monitoring application

This paper presents a wireless sensor network node designed for building a structural health monitoring (SHM) application. To develop a low-cost, low-power, dedicated wireless sensor node for a composite SHM system, a modular approach is taken in the design of the wireless sensor node. Three functional modules are adopted, including a sensor input unit, processing core and wireless communication. Different from existing wireless sensor nodes, the signal conditioning circuit is designed on this developed node for two typical SHM sensors, the piezoelectric sensor and the strain gauge. The developed wireless sensor nodes can be expediently used to deploy the dedicated wireless sensor network for SHM application. A two-tier wireless sensor network is deployed adopting the designed wireless sensor nodes to verify the efficacy of developing SHM systems. An embedding pattern matching method and a directed diffusion routing algorithm are developed to monitor the strain distribution or the bolt loosening position successfully.