A review on sensors and systems in structural health monitoring: current issues and challenges

Abstract

Sensors and systems in Civionics technology play an important role for continuously facilitating real-time structure monitoring systems by detecting and locating damage to or degradation of structures. An advanced materials, design processes, long-term sensing ability of sensors, electromagnetic interference, sensor placement techniques, data acquisition and computation, temperature, harsh environments, and energy consumption are important issues related to sensors for structural health monitoring (SHM). This paper provides a comprehensive survey of various sensor technologies, sensor classes and sensor networks in Civionics research for existing SHM systems. The detailed classification of sensor categories, applications, networking features, ranges, sizes and energy consumptions are investigated, summarized, and tabulated along with corresponding key references. The current challenges facing typical sensors in Civionics research are illustrated with a brief discussion on the progress of SHM in future applications. The purpose of this review is to discuss all the types of sensors and systems used in SHM research to provide a sufficient background on the challenges and problems in optimizing design techniques and understanding infrastructure performance, behavior and current condition. It is observed that the most important factors determining the quality of sensors and systems and their reliability are the long-term sensing ability, data rate, types of processors, size, power consumption, operation frequency, etc. This review will hopefully lead to increased efforts toward the development of low-powered, highly efficient, high data rate, reliable sensors and systems for SHM.