BSHM-WSN: A wireless sensor network for bridge structure health monitoring

Abstract

With the recognition of structural safety and the development of monitoring technique, Structure health monitoring (SHM) has already become an important research direction in engineering structures. Wireless sensor network becomes a research hotspot of SHM with the characteristics such as convenience for remote monitoring, good fault-tolerant ability, easiness of system diagnosis and maintenance, etc. In this paper, a wireless sensor network for bridge structure health monitoring (BSHM-WSN) is designed, implemented, deployed and tested on the ZhengDian viaduct bridge in China. In comparison with prior bridge monitoring systems and sensor network prototypes, this work has two major contributions. First, the BSHM-WSN architecture is designed with careful consideration of application requirements such as energy efficiency, routing, and high-frequency sampling. Second, the BSHM-WSN is deployed in a real bridge solving the problem of structural data acquisition, and simulations results are given based on real data collected from the experiments.