Impact localization by a multi-radio sink–based wireless sensor network for large-scale structures

Abstract

With the rapid development of wireless sensor network technology, more and more researchers have been interested in taking advantages of wireless sensor network to reduce weight and cost and to solve the installing problem of the wired structural health monitoring systems. A number of wireless-based structural health monitoring methods have been developed over the years to ensure the safety of large-scale structures. However, little research has been reported on wireless impact monitoring of large-scale composite structures due to the limitations of ordinary monitoring methods and wireless sensor networks. In this article, a wireless multi-radio sink which can access multiple communication channels is developed and adopted to build an impact monitoring wireless sensor network. Besides, a corresponding network architecture with an energy-weighted factor–based localization method adopted is presented to enable impact localization within the whole monitoring scope of the network. To verify the performance of the impact monitoring wireless sensor network, the experiments are performed on complex aircraft composite structures and the experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed wireless sensor network.