Full-scale testing of civil structures using wireless sensing technologies

Abstract

Performing full-scale structural testing is an important methodology for researchers and engineers in civil engineering industry. The full-scale testing helps the researchers understand civil structure’s loading scenarios, behaviors, and health conditions. It helps engineers verify, polish, and simplify the structural design and analysis theories. To conduct a fullscale structural testing, sensors are used for data acquisitions. Structural researchers and engineers use sensors to record various physical parameters of civil structure and to convert these parameters to analog or digital signals. The physical parameters most often used to depict the property, behavior, or health condition of civil structure include accelerations, velocities, displacements, positions, strains, and forces. In addition, temperatures, pressures, sound, flow rates, viscosities, optical radiations, and electromagnetic fields have been used as well. Based upon their application methodologies, sensors used for civil structure testing could be categorized into traditional contact sensors and remote (non-contact) sensors. Based upon their data communication strategies, sensors used for civil structure testing could be divided into traditional cabled sensors and wireless sensors. Wireless sensing technologies employ wireless communications. They can be wireless accelerometers, wireless strain sensors, wireless thermal sensors, and many other types of sensors with wireless communication functions. Compared to cabled sensors, wireless sensors can potentially significantly reduce implementation time and costs, thus facilitating deployment of a dense network of sensors for structural health monitoring (SHM). This paper reviews the wireless sensing technologies for full-scale structural testing applications, especially focusing on the Illinois WSSN (wireless smart sensor network) applications. It is expected to help structural researchers and engineers get familiar with the novel wireless sensing technologies and select the most effective testing tools.