Wireless structural health monitoring for critical members of civil infrastructures using piezoelectric active sensors

This paper presents several challenging issues on wireless structural health monitoring techniques for critical members of civil infrastructures using piezoelectric active sensors. The basic concept of the techniques is to monitor remotely the structural integrity by observing the impedance variations at the piezoelectric active sensors distributed to critical members of a host structure. An active sensing node incorporating on-board microprocessor and radio frequency telemetry is introduced in a sense of tailoring wireless sensing technology to the impedance method. A data compression algorithm using principal component analysis is embedded into the on-board chip of the active sensing node. The data compression algorithm would promote efficiency in terms of both power management and noise elimination of the active sensor node. Finally, a piezoelectric sensor self-diagnosis issue is touched introducing a new impedance model equation that incorporates the effects of sensor and bonding defects.