Wireless sensor network for decentralized damage detection of building structures

The smart sensor technology has opened new horizons for assessing and monitoring structural health of civil infrastructure. Smart sensor's unique features such as onboard computation, wireless communication, and cost effectiveness can enable a dense network of sensors that is essential for accurate assessment of structural health in large-scale civil structures. While most research efforts to date have been focused on realizing wireless smart sensor networks (WSSN) on bridge structures, relatively less attention is paid to applying this technology to buildings. This paper presents a decentralized damage detection using the WSSN for building structures. An existing flexibility-based damage detection method is extended to be used in the decentralized computing environment offered by the WSSN and implemented on MEMSIC's Imote2 smart sensor platform. Numerical simulation and laboratory experiment are conducted to validate the WSSN for decentralized damage detection of building structures.