Design of a Wireless Sensor Network for Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges

Abstract

As the installation costs of conventional sensors are expensive and time intensive to deploy, wireless sensor networks are promise to provide an expedient alternative. New wireless sensor platforms and distributed processing algorithms, going hand in hand with new or enhanced monitoring methods, promise an early damage detection and damage estimation. The design of a wireless sensor network for the Structural Health Monitoring of bridges is presented. The network is based on using commercially available wireless sensors to measure and extract the vibration characteristics of a bridge. Due to the distances associated with large systems trade-offs are necessary in the standard network design. One key feature of the present system proposed is the need of multi-hop of partially processed data to the base station. The functionality of the network is verified in a laboratory experiment.