Abstract
This paper presents the development of a newly designed wireless piezoelectric (PZT) sensor platform for distributed large-scale structure health monitoring, where real-time data acquisition with high sampling rate up to 12.5 Msps (sample per second) and distributed lamb-wave data processing are implemented. In the proposed wireless PZT network, a set of PZT transducers are deployed at the surface of the structure, a lamb-wave is excited, and its propagation characteristics within the structure are inspected to identify damages. The developed wireless node platform features a digital signal processor (DSP) of TMS320F28335 and an improved IEEE 802.15.4 wireless data transducer RF233 with up to 2 Mbps data rate. Each node supports up to 8 PZT transducers, one of which works as the actuator generating the lamb-wave at an arbitrary frequency, while the responding vibrations at other PZT sensors are sensed simultaneously. In addition to hardware, embedded signal processing and distributed data processing algorithm are designed as the intelligent “brain” of the proposed wireless monitoring network to extract features of the PZT signals, so that the data transmitted over the wireless link can be reduced significantly.
Highlights
Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a system to monitor the integrity of civil structures and ensure their performance and safety, which has become an attractive research topic in the disciplinary field of mechanical, civil, and electronic engineering
As a nondestructive evaluation (NDE) method, the well-known lamb-wave-based damage detection has been widely used in SHM [1, 2], which utilizes the features of piezoelectric (PZT) materials and shows great promises for online SHM
In lamb-wave-based approach, there has been recent interest in the use of PZT transducers, because of their simplicity, robustness, and potentially low cost. In such a PZT-based SHM system, a set of PZT transducers are deployed at the surface of the structure, and one or more PZT transducers work as exciters to induce lamb-waves into the structures
Summary
Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a system to monitor the integrity of civil structures (e.g., bridges and aircraft wings) and ensure their performance and safety, which has become an attractive research topic in the disciplinary field of mechanical, civil, and electronic engineering. Conventional design of wireless sensor node is not suitable for active sensing in SHM, where the lamb-waves to be sensed are high-frequency ultrasonic signals and contain frequency components up to a few hundred Hz. As a result, high sampling rate is required and a huge amount of data will be collected during the procedure of lamb-wave interrogation. To achieve a practical wireless PZT sensor and actuator network for structure health monitoring, the wireless senor nodes must be armed with some kind of distributed data processing and compressive sensing or downsampling algorithm capabilities, such that the amount of data to be transmitted over the wireless link can be reduced. The amount of data to be transmitted over the wireless link is reduced significantly These features enable the developed PZT sensor-actuator node to be deployed and suitable for wide area SHM.
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