Addressing the detection capability for scalable energy consumption using primary data acquisition system of embedded ultrasonic sensors in SHM

The long range inspection and long term monitoring of civil structures is a very important issue for structural integrity. Embedded ultrasonic active measurements can be a cost-effective and operator-friendly technique for damage/change detection system in infrastructure. For long term monitoring, the energy parameter should be calibrated to the required change detection capability. An experimental system was specially developed for these applications which allow transmitting, receiving and scaling the parameters of ultrasonic signals using a Labview application. In this paper, we related the first few steps in establishing an energy model that tune, the detection capacity to energy-related sensor parameter such as sample frequency. The primary objective is to apply the model to develop the wireless data acquisition equipment for embedded ultrasonic sensors. We show that for AR based detection feature, the signal sampling rate can be tuned close to the Nyquist frequency.