Abstract
Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems have shown great potential to sense the responses of a bridge system, diagnose the current structural conditions, predict the expected future performance, provide information for maintenance, and validate design hypotheses. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that have the benefits of reducing implementation costs of SHM systems as well as improving data processing efficiency become an attractive alternative to traditional tethered sensor systems. This paper introduces recent technology developments in the field of bridge health monitoring using WSNs. As a special application of WSNs, the requirements and characteristics of WSNs when used for bridge health monitoring are firstly briefly discussed. Then, the state of the art in WSNs-based bridge health monitoring systems is reviewed including wireless sensor, network topology, data processing technology, power management, and time synchronization. Following that, the performance validations and applications of WSNs in bridge health monitoring through scale models and field deployment are presented. Finally, some existing problems and promising research efforts for promoting applications of WSNs technology in bridge health monitoring throughout the world are explored.
Highlights
A large number of bridges have been built to fulfill the requirement of advanced transportation all over the world and represent the key elements in terms of the safety and functionality of the entire highway system
The rapid reduction in physical size and cost of MEMS-based wireless sensors and improvement of Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) performance enable deployment of dense arrays of sensors to be feasible and economical, so that the quality of Structural health monitoring (SHM) can be dramatically improved with rich information which diagnosis algorithms can utilize to detect, locate, and assess structural damage, which is critical for SHM of complicated and large-scale bridges
The results showed that the proposed approach for decentralized modal analysis and damage diagnosis is efficient [46], while the Eigensystem realization algorithm (ERA) and /ERA can be replaced by other system identification methods such as stochastic subspace identification (SSI) [60] or frequency domain decomposition (FDD) with random decrement technique (RDT) [80]
Summary
A large number of bridges have been built to fulfill the requirement of advanced transportation all over the world and represent the key elements in terms of the safety and functionality of the entire highway system. The rapid reduction in physical size and cost of MEMS-based wireless sensors and improvement of WSNs performance enable deployment of dense arrays of sensors to be feasible and economical, so that the quality of SHM can be dramatically improved with rich information which diagnosis algorithms can utilize to detect, locate, and assess structural damage, which is critical for SHM of complicated and large-scale bridges. After the use of wireless communications in lieu of wires within a structural monitoring system by Straser and Kiremidjian [18] in 1998 as a means of reducing installation costs in large-scale structures, application of WSNs in bridge health monitoring has gained considerable attention. It should be noted that this review is not intended to be exhaustive listing but to provide representative examples as references for future researches
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