Towards the Design of Wireless Communicating Reinforced Concrete

This paper addresses the concept of a smart-node wireless network designed for structural health monitoring applications. The network architecture is based on a smart mesh composed of sensing nodes and communicating nodes. The sensing nodes are used to implement the so named communicating material/communicating concrete and collect physical data for structural health monitoring purposes. These data are sent to the communicating nodes that interface the smart-node network with the digital world through the Internet. The sensing nodes are batteryless and wirelessly powered by the communicating nodes via a wireless power transmission interface. Experimental results have been obtained for a simplified sensing node using a LoRaWAN uplink wireless communication (from the sensing node to the communicating node) proving that the functionality of the sensing nodes can be controlled wirelessly by using only the wireless power transmission downlink.