Design of a Distributed Low-Cost and Low-Power Sensor Unit based on Acceleration Principle

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is an area of growing interest and worthy of new and innovative approaches. As constructions get more and more complex, SHM becomes indispensable and mandatory. This is especially true for the rapidly growing transportation domain, particular in rail industry where there is an urgent need to increase the reliability of rail infrastructure, car bodies and optimise maintenance since train traffic, train speed and tonnage carried on rail networks are significantly increasing. In this work, a low cost, wireless embedded system is proposed, using the acceleration principle, to periodically sense possible cracks in a surface; hence, perform smart and continuous SHM. Specifically, the wireless sensor unit is using a cost effective accelerometer and a gyroscope. Experiments in a simple structure by simulating cracks with pencil lead breaks were performed. In order to identify the simulated cracks, a new method using Generative Adversarial Networks is used and presented in our paper.