Active Sensing Platform for Wireless Structural Health Monitoring

This paper presents SHiMmer, a wireless platform for sensing and actuation that combines localized processing with energy harvesting to provide long-lived structural health monitoring. The life-cycle of the node is significantly extended by the use of super-capacitors for energy storage instead of batteries. During this period the node is expected to work completely maintenance-free. The node is capable of harvesting up to 780 J per day. This makes it completely self- sufficient while employed in real structural health monitoring applications. Unlike other sensor networks that periodically monitor a structure and route information to a base station, our device acquires the data and processes it locally after being radio-triggered by an external agent. The localized processing allows us to avoid issues due to network congestion. Our experiments show that its 32- bits computational core can run at 100 MIPS for 15 minutes daily.