Auto-Regressive Compensation Technique for a Reliable Non Invasive Structural Health Monitoring System

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Detecting the health status of buildings is critical to produce correct diagnoses that could prevent many pathologies, as well as driving maintenance interventions through timely and well targeted operations. The constant innovation in the development of low power wireless sensing devices provides an unparalleled chance to develop efficient monitoring system prototypes, conceived to be very low intrusive and operating in real-time, that can be applied also on existing buildings, without any need to predispose chases for power conveyance or communication cables. Its adoption is expected to be useful not only for standard health status monitoring of buildings during their lifecycle, but also for automated monitoring of old buildings during the execution of renovation works. The latter being referred to the possibility that unexpected collapses may endanger the conditions of workers engaged on the construction-site, where alerting in advance would prevent many deaths on the job. In this paper a low-power, wireless, easily installable structural monitoring system based on tilt sensors is developed, on which several integrated logics for automated control of building's health conditions are implemented. As its preliminary evaluation on a real building demonstrated that external temperature variations cause inaccurate measurements, an experimental setup capable of reproducing dynamic conditions due to environmental actions on the system has been developed. It was used both for developing an autoregressive model to be implemented for temperature compensation, and to perform its validation. The technologies and logics for remote automated monitoring are presented.

Buildings’ Biaxial Tilt Assessment Using Inertial Wireless Sensors and a Parallel Training Model

“…In [25], tilts were monitored with MEMS accelerometers in real time, and a user interface was created; six sensors were installed on the structure body to monitor three axes, but tilt patterns were not recognized, and their severity was not calculated. In some projects, real-time monitoring was carried out [18,25]; however, alarms were only included in [3]. In [49], a system with accelerometers and inclinometers for structural health monitoring was presented but not based on permanent supervision.…”

“…Structural health monitoring implements a damage identification strategy for infrastructure [14][15][16], including tilts and high-rise building safety detection methods [17]. The approach consists of integrating technologies that allow obtaining information for the prevention of injuries in structures, such as vibrations detected in towers [18,19] and bridges [20]. Some studies used the dynamic acceleration produced by inertial sensors according to the application requirements [21].…”