Active-sensing platform for structural health monitoring: Development and deployment

Embedded sensing for structural health monitoring is a rapidly expanding field, propelled by algorithmic advances in structural health monitoring and the ever-shrinking size and cost of electronic hardware necessary for its implementation. Although commercial systems are available to perform the relevant tasks, they are usually bulky and/or expensive because of their high degree of general utility to a wider range of applications. As a result, multiple separate devices may be required in order to obtain the same results that could be obtained with a structural health monitoring–specific device. This work presents the development and deployment of a versatile, Wireless Active-Sensing Platform, designed for the particular needs of embedded sensing for multi-scale structural health monitoring. The Wireless Active-Sensing Platform combines a conventional data acquisition ability to record voltage output (e.g. from strain or acceleration transducers) with ultrasonic guided wave-based active-sensing, and a seamlessly integrated impedance measurement mode, enabling impedance-based structural health monitoring and piezoelectric sensor diagnostics to reduce the potential for false positives in damage identification. The motivation, capabilities, and hardware design for the Wireless Active-Sensing Platform are reviewed, and three deployment examples are presented, each demonstrating an important aspect of embedded sensing for structural health monitoring.