In-Situ Validation of a Wireless Data Acquisition System by Monitoring a Pedestrian Bridge

Abstract

When compared to wired sensor technology, wireless sensor technology often suffers long data collection delay, big noise floor and data loss. Addressing these challenges, a wireless data acquisition system was designed and implemented by the authors. It can provide a performance comparable to the one of a wired data acquisition system. In this paper, the system is validated by its application in the monitoring of a timber pedestrian bridge in Italy. The system features flexible sensor interfaces, high power efficiency, low noise data acquisition, real-time and lossless wireless data transmission, and a convenient graphical user interface. Two field experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, the wireless data acquisition unit was designed to use an unreliable communication mode, resulting in an underestimated data loss problem. In the second experiment, the system is improved. The ACK-RETRIES reliable communication mode and a data packet sequence number checking mechanism are adopted, so that the data loss was avoided. For a comparison, a wired portable data acquisition system VSS-3000 was also used to acquire data from one accelerometer. The results show that the wireless data acquisition system is able to acquire high quality data from low noise sensors in real time without data loss. Compared to the VSS-3000, the data acquired by the wireless sensor platform have a comparable and even better quality.

Geothermal Power: Monitoring the Building Response During Installation

“…The selected kind of accelerometer is compatible with the wireless acquisition system designed in [3][4] and implemented into several testing applications (see [5][6], among others).…”

Optimal data collection of multi-radio multi-channel multi-power wireless sensor networks for structural monitoring applications: A simulation study

“…Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems are widely deployed in large civil infrastructures (especially for long‐span bridges and high‐rise buildings) to enable health diagnosis and damage detection so as to improve public safety . Most existing SHM systems were implemented based on wired monitoring networks .…”

“…Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems are widely deployed in large civil infrastructures (especially for long-span bridges and high-rise buildings) to enable health diagnosis and damage detection so as to improve public safety. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Most existing SHM systems were implemented based on wired monitoring networks. 10,11 In recent years, with the fast development of wireless communication technologies, wireless sensors network (WSN) is emerging to replace wired monitoring technologies, because of the superiority in installation, cost, system expansion, and maintenance.…”

On-board data synchronization in wireless structural health monitoring systems based on phase locking

“…The logistics for installing structural health monitoring (SHM) systems, in terms of cabling, data acquisition units, and servers for storage and system management, have been posing non‐negligible constraints in SHM applications . Over the past three decades, wireless technologies have been introduced in SHM in an attempt to tackle these constraints . Nonetheless, the most important shortcomings of wireless SHM systems stem from the features that constitute their very benefits over cable‐based SHM systems .…”