Intelligent Monitoring of Multistory Buildings under Unknown Earthquake Excitation by a Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

It is necessary to investigate techniques for monitoring structures under unknown earthquakes. For this purpose, an algorithm is proposed in this paper for the identification of structures and excitation of multi-story shear buildings with limited measurements of structural responses. The equation of motion of a multi-story shear building under ground motion is established in the absolute co-ordinate system, while the multi-story building is decomposed into substructures. A novel two-step Kalman estimator approach, which is not available in the previous literature, is proposed for the identification substructures and unknown ground motion with less computational effort. Then, for the purpose of intelligent structural monitoring, a new wireless sensor network is developed in this paper. The designed wireless sensor network has a two-level cluster-tree architecture. Hardware designs of the sensor unit and the cluster head are presented; especially the cluster head contains a low power digital signal processor with strong computing capacity. Thus, the wireless sensor network has the unique feature offers distributed computing at group level. Finally, the proposed algorithm is embedded into the wireless sensor network for intelligent structural monitoring and an experimental test shows the technique is effective for intelligent monitoring of multi-story buildings under unknown earthquakes.

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.…”

Wireless Sensor Placement for Bridge Health Monitoring Using a Generalized Genetic Algorithm

“…Furthermore, WSNs feature onboard computation and easy installation and are small in size, which increases the e±ciency of the SHM system. 9,10 Recently, there have been several successful implementations of WSNbased SHM systems on full-scale bridges that have demonstrated the feasibility of the technology. [11][12][13] The main objective of bridge SHM is the identi¯cation of structural damage.…”

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

“…wireless sensor platforms intended for structural monitoring applications have been developed (Arms et al 2010;Flouri et al 2012;Kim et al 2010;Lei et al 2012;Meyer et al 2010;Rice et al 2008;Whelan et al 2010).…”

“…Wireless sensor platforms can be categorized into three classes: the first class (internal sensors class) comes specific integrated sensors (Rice et al 2008); the second class (external sensors class) does not show any specific sensor integrated (Kim et al 2010;Lei et al 2012;Meyer et al 2010); the third class is hybrid, i.e., it has some specific sensors integrated but also offers software, which features real time data plotting and convenient system configuration, is developed within the Matlab GUIDE tool.…”