On the suitability of redundant accelerometers for the implementation of smart oscillation monitoring system: Preliminary assessment

Abstract

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an essential aspect to ensure the safety and longevity of civil infrastructure. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in developing SHM systems based on Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology. MEMS-based sensors are small, low-power, and cost-effective, making them ideal for large-scale deployment in structural monitoring systems. However, the use of MEMS-based sensors in SHM systems can be challenging due to their inherent errors, such as drift, noise, and bias instability; these errors can affect the accuracy and reliability of the measured data, leading to false alarms or missed detections. Therefore, several methods have been proposed to compensate for these errors and improve the performance of MEMS-based SHM systems. For this purpose, the authors propose the combined of a redundant configuration of cost-effective MEMS accelerometers and a Kalman Filter approach to compensate MEMS inertial sensor errors and data filtering; the performance of the method is preliminarily assessed by means of a custom-controlled oscillation generator and compared with that granted by a high-cost, high-performance MEMS reference system where amplitude differences of 0.02 m/s2 have been experienced. Finally, a sensor node for real-time monitoring has been proposed that exploits LoRaWAN and NFC protocols to access the structure information to be monitored.