RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING OF BRIDGES WITH A WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an active area of research devoted to systems that can autonomously and proactively assess the structural integrity of civil buildings. Structural monitoring systems using wireless sensors have the potential to serve as low-cost alternatives to commercially available cable-based monitoring systems. In this paper we discuss our deployment experiences and evaluate the performance of a multi-hop wireless data acquisition system for structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridges. Our experiments indicate that, with the latest sensor network hardware, our networks can reliably deliver time-synchronized vibration data across multiple hops with low latencies for sampling rates up to 350Hz. From findings from a field validation test, strong agreement is observed between the data collected by the wireless system and cable-based monitoring system.