A Review on Advancement in Sensor Technology in Structural Health Monitoring System

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has been in existence for a century but gained attention in near past for the diagnostics and safe use of the structures. Different types of civil structures we use every day like bridges tunnels pipelines and proper monitoring is required for these structures for the long life of them. Lessons learns from the past failure of structures invented the need of structural health monitoring in the infrastructure field. Work in this field from past 5 decades and with the advancement in technologies we can now easily predict the behavior of structures and damage within them. In older times only visual inspection is done in the name of the health monitoring but with the help of modern sensors minute defects inside the structures can be easily detected. SHM comes under the nondestructive testing domain of structures and gaining prominence in the civil engineering. There is a recent spur in SHM due to the advancement in computing technologies. Different types of sensors are linked with the hardware’s and software’s to get the desired information’s about the structures and helping to reduce the further risk to them. Data acquired with these sensors helps us to detect the localized damage and predicting the useful remaining life of the structure. In India SHM is a relative new term and in a country where policy makers are the politicians, no one is interested in increasing the life span of structures. Since SHM is not a technology which general masses are aware of but every new infrastructure project should be equipped with the SHM systems to detect the damages in these structure due to the aging, harsh environment conditions etc. There is recent advancement on the sensing technology among which wireless sensors are gaining popularity. This paper presents the upcoming changes in the sensing system in structural health monitoring and their relative advantage and disadvantage and factors leading to their adaption in developing countries. This paper check the feasibility of use of modern structural health monitoring techniques in India. This paper discuss the wireless sensing technology and their relative advantage and disadvantage in details. Keywords: Structural Health Monitoring System, Sensing Technology, Wireless sensing technology, SHM in India Cite this Article Harshit Jain, Anupam Rawat, AK Sachan . Review on Advancement in Sensor Technology in Structural Health Monitoring System. Journal of Structural Engineering and Management. 2015; 2(3): 1–7p.