Wireless Strain Sensor Development for Civil Infrastructure

Industrialized nations have made huge investments in civil infrastructure and attention must be given to its proper maintenance. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and Damage Detection (DD) strategies have been developed by many researchers in support of efficient operation and maintenance of civil infrastructure. Smart wireless sensor networks are promising in that they have the potential to dramatically improve SHM/DD. The Berkeley Mote smart sensor, with its embedded microprocessor and wireless communication capability, has emerged as an important new open hardware/software platform for SHM/DD. However, available sensors are limited and not necessarily optimized for civil infrastructure applications. Strain is one of the important physical quantities used to judge the health of a structure; strain sensors are currently unavailable for the Berkeley Mote platform. In this paper, a new strain sensor board for the Berkeley Mote platform is developed, and its performance is experimentally verified.