Wireless sensors information fusion for structural health monitoring

The process of implementing a damage detection strategy for engineering systems is often referred to as structural health monitoring (SHM). And Structural Health Monitoring is very important for large structures like suspension- and cable-stayed bridges, towers, offshore platforms and so on. Some advance technologies for infrastructure health monitoring have been caused much more attentions, in which the wireless sensor network (WSN) is recently received special interests. The WSN would have lower capital and installation costs as well as ensure more reliability in the communication of sensor measurements. However, in the context of untethered nodes, the finite energy budget is a primary design constraint. Therefore, one wants to process data as much as possible inside the network to reduce the number of bits transmitted, particularly over longer distances. In this, paper, a WSN is proposed for health monitoring of the offshore platform, and a laboratory prototype was designed and developed to demonstrate the feasibility and validity of the proposed WSN. In the laboratory prototype, wireless sensor nodes were deployed on a model of offshore platform, a Wireless Sensor Local Area Network (WSLAN) transfers the simulated data among personal computer and microsensor nodes peripherals without cables. To minimize the energy consumption, algorithms for fusing the acceleration, temp and magnetic sensors on a single node are being developed. And based on fusing the data from local nodes, the current state of structure health was determined. In our deployment, we using UC Berkeley motes as the wireless sensor nodes to examine many of the issues relating to their usage and our information fusion algorithm.