Wireless Structure Health Monitoring

1. Overview
2. Participants
3. Major findings
4. Publications
5. Dissemination
6. Funding sources

Overview

Throughout the life cycle of a civil structure, its serviceability must be assessed in a timely manner. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) strategies measure structural response and aim to detect, locate, and assess damage produced by severe loading events and environmental deterioration. At the University of Houston, prototype piezoceramics-based smart aggregates (SA) have been designed for concrete structures. Inherited from the property of a PZT, the SA has the unique feature that it can function both as a sensor and an actuator. As an actuator, an SA excites elastic stress waves to propagate through the concrete structure, which can be detected by sensors. Distributed active sensing exhibit different sensing and energy characteristics compared to passive sensing and stand-alone active sensing systems. The goal of this project is the development of a scalable framework and efficient algorithms for cooperative active sensing in wireless SHM systems. 

Major Findings

Our work has advanced the state of the art in three main aspects, 1) design of SA-based structure health monitoring system, 2) a new actuation-sensing-communication paradigm, and 3) geometric tools for analyzing active sensing

A. SA-based structure health monitoring 

B. A new active sensing paradigm

C. Geometric tools for active sensing

Participants

• Khuong Vu (CS)
• Amit Pendharkar (CS)
• Rajat Khanda (CS)
• Peng Li (ECE)
• Hai-Chang Gu (ME)
• Gangbing Song (ME)
• Y. L. Mo (Civil)

Major Publications

1. Vu, K, Zheng R.  2011.  Robust Coverage under Uncertainty in Wireless Sensor Networks. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (INFOCOM)
2. Vu, K, Zheng R.  2010.  Multi-target Tracking in Distributed Active Sensor Networks. The military communication conference (Milcom)
3. Zheng, R, Vu K, Pendharkar A.  2010.  Obstacle Discovery in Distributed Actuator and Sensor Networks. ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN). Volume 7( Issue 3)
4. Xia, N, Vu K, Zheng R.  2010.  Sensor Placement for Minimum Exposure in Distributed Active Sensing Networks.IEEE Global Communication Conference (Globecom)
5. Li, P, Gu H, Song G, Zheng R, Mo YL.  2010.  Concrete Structural Health Monitoring Using Piezoceramic-Based Wireless Sensor Networks. SPIE International Journal on Smart Structures and Systems, SI on Wireless Sensor Advances and Applications for Civil Infrastructure Monitoring
6. Kumar, R, Zheng R, Song G.  2010.  WiSeREmulator: An Emulation Framework for Wireless Structural Health Monitoring. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, SI on Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Network Systems
7. Zheng, R, Pendharkar A.  2009.  Obstacle Discovery in Distributed Active Sensor Networks. The 28th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (INFOCOM).
8. Li, P, Song G, Zheng R, Mo YL.  2009.  Piezo-Based Wireless Sensor Networks for Civil Structural Health Monitoring.The 1st International Postgraduate Conference on Infrastructure and Environment.
9. Pendharkar, A, Olmi C, Zheng R, Son G.  2008.  High rate sensing in wireless civil structure monitoring. the 11th Biennial ASCE Aerospace Division International Conference – Intelligent Sensors and Actuators Track.

Dissemination

Funding sources

This project is funded by National Science Foundation (CNS-0832089)