Abstract
Ubiquitous smartphones have created a significant opportunity to form a low-cost wireless Citizen Sensor network and produce big data for monitoring structural integrity and safety under operational and extreme loads. Such data are particularly useful for rapid assessment of structural damage in a large urban setting after a major event such as an earthquake. This study explores the utilization of smartphone accelerometers for measuring structural vibration, from which structural health and post-event damage can be diagnosed. Widely available smartphones are tested under sinusoidal wave excitations with frequencies in the range relevant to civil engineering structures. Large-scale seismic shaking table tests, observing input ground motion and response of a structural model, are carried out to evaluate the accuracy of smartphone accelerometers under operational, white-noise and earthquake excitations of different intensity. Finally, the smartphone accelerometers are tested on a dynamically loaded bridge. The extensive experiments show satisfactory agreements between the reference and smartphone sensor measurements in both time and frequency domains, demonstrating the capability of the smartphone sensors to measure structural responses ranging from low-amplitude ambient vibration to high-amplitude seismic response. Encouraged by the results of this study, the authors are developing a citizen-engaging and data-analytics crowdsourcing platform towards a smartphone-based Citizen Sensor network for structural health monitoring and post-event damage assessment applications.
Highlights
With the rapid advances in computer and sensor technologies in the last two decades, structural health monitoring (SHM), mostly based on structural vibration, has become an important research field in civil engineering [1,2]
In order to examine the capabilities of smartphone sensors for measuring different types of vibration at different amplitudes, large-scale seismic shaking table tests are performed on a masonry column model, as shown in Figure 3, involving operational, white noise and earthquake excitation inputs
A comprehensive experimental study, involving seismic shaking table tests and bridge field tests, was carried out to investigate the performance of smartphone accelerometers in measuring structural response to dynamic loading ranging from low-amplitude ambient to high-amplitude seismic excitations, as well as sinusoidal excitations
Summary
With the rapid advances in computer and sensor technologies in the last two decades, structural health monitoring (SHM), mostly based on structural vibration, has become an important research field in civil engineering [1,2]. Wireless sensors aim to solve some of these issues, additional issues are introduced regarding power consumption, data acquisition and networking These issues have hindered practical implementation of SHM methodologies on massive scales such as networks of highway bridges and urban areas with large stocks of buildings. Network” are utilized to simulate structural response based on the Timoshenko beam theory [18] These studies show the potential of using smartphones to measure vibrations. Encouraged by the recent development and the enthusiasm of citizens to participate, the authors propose a smartphone-based Citizen Sensor network to collect structural integrity data at low cost. The measurement could be automatically triggered by an event (such as an earthquake) when the phones are placed in such holders
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