Implementation of a WSN system towards SHM of civil building structures

Structural health monitoring of civil structures is an important research area used for continuous health monitoring and damage prediction. To estimate the damage of various civil structures continuous monitoring of modal parameters is required. These are derived from natural frequency of buildings and are measured mostly using accelerometer sensor. The accuracy of the system not only depends on sensor accuracy but also on the wireless sensor network used for data acquisition and its transmission from sensor node to coordinator for further processing. This paper focuses on the implementation of wireless sensor network system for structural health monitoring of buildings using IEEE 802.15.4 standard based TIMAC protocol stack from Texas Instruments. The hardware used for the implementation of WSN is TI-MSP430F5438 experimenter board along with CC2520 transceiver. Our work gives mathematical relation of WSN parameters such as ADC parameters, transmitter sampling rate, SPI frequency, UART data rate which are critical in determining the modal parameters for structural health monitoring of buildings w.r.t sensor sampling rate. The WSN system has been tested with accelerometer sensor mounted on shaker (PCB-K2007E01) and buildings.