Development of a Wireless Unified-Maintenance System for the Structural Health Monitoring of Civil Structures

A disaster preventive structural health monitoring (SHM) system needs to be equipped with the following abilities: First, it should be able to simultaneously measure diverse types of data (e.g., displacement, velocity, acceleration, strain, load, temperature, humidity, etc.) for accurate diagnosis. Second, it also requires standalone power supply to guarantee its immediate response in crisis (e.g., sudden interruption of normal AC power in disaster situations). Furthermore, it should be capable of prompt processing and realtime wireless communication of a huge amount of data. Therefore, this study is aimed at developing a wireless unified-maintenance system (WUMS) that would satisfy all the requirements for a disaster preventive SHM system of civil structures. The WUMS is designed to measure diverse types of structural responses in realtime based on wireless communication, allowing users to selectively use WiFi RF band and finally working in standalone mode by means of the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. To verify its performance, the following tests were performed: (i) A test to see how far communication is possible in open field, (ii) a test on a shaker to see how accurate responses are, (iii) a modal test on a bridge to see how exactly characteristic real-time dynamic responses are of structures. The test results proved that the WUMS was able to secure stable communication far up to nearly 800 m away by acquiring wireless responses in realtime accurately, when compared to the displacement and acceleration responses which were acquired through wired communication. The analysis of dynamic characteristics also showed that the wireless acceleration responses in real-time represented satisfactorily the dynamic properties of structures. Therefore, the WUMS is proved valid as a SHM, and its outstanding performance is also proven.