Coupling sensing hardware with data interrogation software for structural health monitoring

The process of implementing a damage detection strategy for aerospace, civil and mechanical engineering infrastructure is referred to as structural health monitoring (SHM). The authors' approach is to address the SHM problem in the context of a statistical pattern recognition paradigm. In this paradigm, the process can be broken down into four parts: (1) Operational Evaluation, (2) Data Acquisition and Cleansing, (3) Feature Extraction and Data Compression, and (4) Statistical Model Development for Feature Discrimination. These processes must be implemented through hardware or software and, in general, some combination of these two approaches will be used. This paper will discuss each portion of the SHM process with particular emphasis on the coupling of a general purpose data interrogation software package for structural health monitoring with a modular wireless sensing and processing platform. More specifically, this paper will address the need to take an integrated hardware/software approach to developing SHM solutions.