Green Wireless Sensing Network for Structural Health Monitoring: A Vertical Approach

Decentralized monitoring systems rely on the coalescence between hardware/software resource exploitation. Green Wireless Sensing (GWS) network can fulfill such requirement in a sustainable manner by offering a more efficient allocation of the communication protocol, power units, and computing scheme. Following this vision, we present a vertical approach to GWS for Structural Health Monitoring at two different levels. On a hardware viewpoint, we present a novel version of a wireless accelerometer sensor compatible with sensor-near vibration analysis based on System Identification (SysId). To improve the energy autonomy and achieve GWS, the board has been equipped with a solar energy harvester and advanced power managing functionalities allowing for a battery duration major than 330 h neglecting the power of the solar cell. Secondly, we propose an original method, called SysId2FDD, for the reconstruction of complex mode shapes from local SysId estimations. The architecture has been deployed on a truss structure and tested in multiple defective configurations, scoring a modal fitting above 94% and effective damage detection.