Implementation of a Secure Storage Using Blockchain for PCA-FRF Sensor Data of Plate-Like Structures

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems have widely been used to guarantee the safe functioning of electrical, mechanical, civil, and aerospace engineering assets. It is required to improve the SHM systems from different aspects in terms of smartification, performance, beneficiation, sustainment, automation, cost-effectivity, and safety using cutting-edge technologies. Blockchain is currently the most revolutionary technology in computer science. Implementation of Blockchain in different fields of academia and industry has recently given very good results. However, application of Blockchain in SHM is still in the infancy stage. Therefore, many challenges are still ahead. One of the main potential applications of Blockchain is to secure the sensor data. In this study, a local Blockchain approach is developed as a secure storage using the extracted Principal Components (PCs) of Frequency Response Function (FRF) data obtained from modal analysis of a plate-like structure. In general, Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) is one of the most practical hash functions with efficient performance which has been employed in Bitcoin. Therefore, in this research, SHA-256 is considered to generate the hash for each block. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop a secure storage for SHM data using Blockchain.