Abstract
Structural health monitoring (SHM) in historical buildings can be achieved through systems that rely on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Such systems have the ability to acquire information fast and reliably, making them ideal for SHM applications. Historical buildings, having been exposed to the wear of time, are especially sensitive to any kind of intervention. As a result, keeping them as intact as possible is a critical factor for their integrity. In the current work, a low-cost WSN system and a synchronization algorithm are developed in order to be employed for SHM of historical buildings. The synchronization of WSN-based SHM systems is critical for the collection of accurate information describing the building’s condition. The effectiveness of the assumed hardware and the synchronization algorithm were evaluated with two experiments. The first took place under laboratory conditions and its results showcase the algorithm’s accuracy of synchronization. The second experiment was conducted in a real-world environment. For that purpose, the Ionian Campus Testbed was chosen since it comprises buildings that are more than 200 years old. These buildings are appropriate since they were built with thick stone walls which help determine the system’s effectiveness under such conditions. The results derived from the second experiment showcase the effects of the packet transmission collision avoidance mechanism utilized by the assumed hardware. Finally, an estimation of the average clock skew required for accurate information gathering is derived, based on the materials comprising a historical building.
Highlights
Historical buildings play an important role in cultural preservation, and in the extraction of new knowledge about the ways of life and religious beliefs in past times
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), and the results show that the algorithm can achieve an average synchronization skew of μs throughout the network
WSN in the two-century-old buildings of the Ionian University Campus [48] and it used the global clock synchronization algorithm described in Section 4 and the per-hop-basis timestamping algorithm [41]
Summary
Historical buildings play an important role in cultural preservation, and in the extraction of new knowledge about the ways of life and religious beliefs in past times. SHM systems can highly contribute to detecting the stability and deformation of a structure and can be employed for the health detection of historical buildings. Sensory devices enhanced with networking capabilities, which enable them to interconnect and exchange valuable information, are the main parts of SHM systems so as to record the necessary. This information can be derived from active approaches that require an action and measurement process to record the necessary parameters. Such an approach can be an active-sensing acousto-ultrasound-based method [2] which has the ability to record the damage inflicted on a structure
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
