New Developments in Sensing Technology for Structural Health Monitoring

424 Pages·2011·16.619 MB·English

by  S. C. Mukhopadhyay, I. Ihara (auth.), Subhas Chandra Mukhopadhyay (eds.)

Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering
Volume 96
Subhas Chandra Mukhopadhyay
New Developments in
Sensing Technology for
Structural Health Monitoring
ABC
Prof.SubhasChandraMukhopadhyay
MasseyUniversity
12WoodgateCourt
PalmerstonNorth
NewZealand
E-mail:[email protected]
ISBN978-3-642-21098-3 e-ISBN978-3-642-21099-0
DOI10.1007/978-3-642-21099-0
LectureNotesinElectricalEngineering ISSN1876-1100
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2011928067
(cid:2)c 2011Springer-VerlagBerlinHeidelberg
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Guest Editorial
In recent times several incidents of bridge/buildings collapse took place in different
parts of the world. After these accidents it has become paramount importance of
early detection of the health of structures and the sensors must have intelligent fea-
tures to detect the problem. It is expected that the special issue have provided many
new ideas of detection and inspection of the health of structures which are very
important for human being and society. There is an urgent need to design, develop,
fabricate of different types of sensors and sensing technology based on non-
invasive techniques to determine the integrity of a material, component or structure
or quantitatively measure some characteristics of the systems to prevent catastro-
phic failure. So in short the fabricated sensor systems should be able to inspect or
measure without doing any harm or damage of the system. Not only the monitoring
of structural health the applications of the developed sensing systems are necessary
at almost any stage in the production or the life cycle of a component in many years
such as civil engineering, metal industry, transportation, power stations, inspection
of pipes and piping systems in industrial plants, fatigue estimation in aircraft sur-
face and other parts and in many other areas.
Many different sensing techniques available with different characteristics are
available for these inspection areas. The following are the most commonly used:
Magnetic, Ultrasonic, Acoustic, Radiography, Eddy current and X-ray. The sen-
sors to be used entirely depend entirely on the specific application.
The proposed Special Issue has focussed on the different aspects of sensing tech-
nology, i.e. high reliability, adaptability, recalibration, information processing, data
fusion, validation and integration of novel and high performance sensors specifically
aims to use to inspect mechanical health of structure and similar applications.
The book, on one hand, illustrates theoretical aspects and applications, and it
displays new criteria in characterizing raw data of SHM, at the other hand. Char-
acterization is a key issue since it allows to know the performances of devices and
systems described in the book by showing some statistics and result representa-
tion. The book contains 15 contributions from experts working on the topic and
under different approaches and aspects; these co-ordinated approaches are the true
richness of the book. The editor gracefully thanks the contributors for contribution
included in this special issue. The editor hopes this special issue will be a very
useful for readers with experience who can breathe fresh life into their research.

Subhas Chandra Mukhopadhyay, Guest Editor
School of Engineering and Advanced Technology (SEAT),
Massey University (Turitea Campus)
Palmerston North, New Zealand
[email protected]
VI Guest Editorial

Dr. Subhas Chandra Mukhopadhyay graduated from
the Department of Electrical Engineering, Jadavpur
University, Calcutta, India in 1987 with a Gold medal
and received the Master of Electrical Engineering
degree from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore,
India in 1989. He obtained the PhD (Eng.) degree
from Jadavpur University, India in 1994 and Doctor
of Engineering degree from Kanazawa University,
Japan in 2000.
During 1989-90 he worked almost 2 years in the research and development de-
partment of Crompton Greaves Ltd., India. In 1990 he joined as a Lecturer in the
Electrical Engineering department, Jadavpur University, India and was promoted
to Senior Lecturer of the same department in 1995.
Obtaining Monbusho fellowship he went to Japan in 1995. He worked with
Kanazawa University, Japan as researcher and Assistant professor till September
2000.
In September 2000 he joined as Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Information
Sciences and Technology, Massey University, New Zealand where he is working
currently as an Associate professor. His fields of interest include Sensors and
Sensing Technology, Electromagnetics, control, electrical machines and numerical
field calculation etc.
He has authored over 200 papers in different international journals and confer-
ences, edited nine conference proceedings. He has also edited eight special issues
of international journals as guest editor and ten books with Springer-Verlag.
He is a Fellow of IEEE (USA), a Fellow of IET (UK), an associate editor of
IEEE Sensors journal and IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measure-
ments. He is in the editorial board of e-Journal on Non-Destructive Testing, Sen-
sors and Transducers, Transactions on Systems, Signals and Devices (TSSD),
Journal on the Patents on Electrical Engineering, Journal of Sensors. He is the co-
Editor-in-chief of the International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent Sys-
tems (www.s2is.org). He is in the technical programme committee of IEEE Sen-
sors conference, IEEE IMTC conference and IEEE DELTA conference and nu-
merous other conferences. He was the Technical Programme Chair of ICARA
2004, ICARA 2006 and ICARA 2009. He was the General chair/co-chair of ICST
2005, ICST 2007, IEEE ROSE 2007, IEEE EPSA 2008, ICST 2008, IEEE Sen-
sors 2008, ICST 2010 and IEEE Sensors 2010. He has organized the IEEE Sen-
sors conference 2009 at Christchurch, New Zealand during October 25 to 28, 2009
as General Chair.
He is the Chair of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society New
Zealand Chapter.
He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Sensors Council.
Contents
Sensors and Technologies for Structural Health Monitoring:
A Review.................................................... 1
S.C. Mukhopadhyay, I. Ihara
Self-sustaining Wireless Acoustic Emission Sensor System
for Bridge Monitoring ....................................... 15
A´kos L´edeczi, P´eter V¨olgyesi, Eric Barth, Andra´s N´adas,
Alexander Pedchenko, Thomas Hay, Subash Jayaraman
Deformation Detection in Structural Health Monitoring ..... 41
Pierantonio Merlino, Antonio Abramo
MEMS Strain Sensors for Intelligent Structural Systems..... 63
Debbie G. Senesky, Babak Jamshidi
A Pattern-Based Framework for Developing Wireless
Monitoring Applications..................................... 75
James Brusey, Elena Gaura, Roger Hazelden
Distributed Brillouin Sensor Application to Structural
Failure Detection ............................................ 93
F. Ravet
Sensing Network Paradigms for Structural Health
Monitoring .................................................. 137
C.R. Farrar, G. Park, M.D. Todd
Reflectometry for Structural Health Monitoring ............. 159
Cynthia Furse
Sensor Fusion in Transportation Infrastructure Systems
Using Belief Functions....................................... 187
Stephen Mensah, Nii O. Attoh-Okine, Ardeshir Faghri
Pulsed Eddy Current Thermography and Applications....... 205
G.Y. Tian, J. Wilson, L. Cheng, D.P. Almond, E. Kostson,
B. Weekes
VIII Contents
The Use of Optical Fibre Sensors in Dam Monitoring........ 233
Ian Platt, Michael Hagedorn, Ian Woodhead
Optical Sensors Based on Fiber Bragg Gratings for
Structural Health Monitoring................................ 253
P. Antunes, H. Lima, N. Alberto, L. Bilro, P. Pinto, A. Costa,
H. Rodrigues, J.L. Pinto, R. Nogueira, H. Varum, P.S. Andr´e
Polymer Optical Fiber Sensors in Structural Health
Monitoring .................................................. 297
Sascha Liehr
Optical Fiber Sensors for Structural Health Monitoring ..... 335
Alayn Loayssa
Sensors Systems, Especially Fibre Optic Sensors
in Structural Monitoring Applications in Concrete:
An Overview ................................................ 359
S.K.T. Grattan, S.E. Taylor, P.M.A. Basheer, T. Sun,
K.T.V. Grattan
Author Index................................................ 427
Sensors and Technologies for Structural Health
Monitoring: A Review
S.C. Mukhopadhyay1 and I. Ihara2
1 School of Engineering and Advanced Technology
Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
[email protected]
2 Department of Mechanical Engineering
Nagaoka University of Technology, Nagaoka, Japan
[email protected]
Abstract. Incidents such as building and bridge collapse are on rise in many parts
of the world without little apparent warning. Due to the increase number of
incidents it has become of increasingly paramount importance to develop methods
detecting the degradation or damage that result in these events. Thus, buildings
and critical infrastructure could be monitored, much like a patient in a hospital, for
signs of degradation or impending disability or collapse. The sensors are very
important to know the state of the health of the structures and technologies are like
human brains to analyze the abnormal situation. This chapter will provide a
review of different available sensors and technologies to be used for monitoring
the health of structures.
1 Introduction and Literature Review
Intelligent sensors and technologies that are able to take a potentially diverse array
of data and create a picture of the structure’s condition will help to determine the
early detection of damage from natural hazards or other events. Thus, the sensors
must have access to or contain intelligent features to detect the problem. It is
therefore important to know wide varieties of sensors and technologies for
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) which can be deployed for the detection and
inspection of structures to increase their safety and reliability. The reported sensor
and technologies should be able to inspect or measure without doing any harm or
damage of the structure. They should also be robust to poor signal-to-noise ratio
compared to the level of damage they are trying to detect in these critical
infrastructures. Finally, they need to be highly reliable and operate without input
for long periods of time, potentially over years.
A lot of research articles have been reported on monitoring health of structures.
A structural health monitoring system based on wireless sensor nodes equipped
with inexpensive strain gauges has been proposed [1]. Due to the deployment of
multi-hop technique the performance of the system is not limited. Strain gauges
are very popular in SHM as they are inexpensive, easy to install and having good
sensitivity to detect potential danger or collapse of a building or structure. The
developed system has been tested with simulated structure.
S.C. Mukhopadhyay (Ed.): New Developments in Sensing Technology for SHM, LNEE 96, pp. 1–14.
springerlink.com © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
2 S.C. Mukhopadhyay and I. Ihara

MEMS inertial sensors [2] including an acceleration sensor and an angular
velocity sensor (gyroscope) can be used as a popular device for monitoring the
health of structure due to their miniaturized size, low cost, mass production and
three-dimensional detection.
An impedance measurement system for lead zirconate titanate (PZT) ceramics
based SHM has been reported in [3]. The PZT sensors are inexpensive, small,
light weight, require low power, less sensitive to temperature variation and
provide a linear response under low electric field.
The importance of monitoring health of aerospace structure using optical
sensors was considered more than a decade back as was reported by Foote and
Read [4]. It states that with the help of a smart sensor network, the stress and
strains induced in the aircraft and possible degradation occurred since last
inspection can be known clearly.
Fibre optic accelerometer based monitoring of civil engineering infrastructure
and damage detection of concrete slab has been reported by Kim and Feng [5].
The sensor system integrates Moire fringe phenomenon with fibre optics to
achieve accurate and reliable measurement.
Fibre optic sensors emerged as an important technology to evaluate structural
integrity [6]. The strain along the fibre length provides distributed information
about mechanical state of the structure.
Bo-lin et. al., [7] have described some works and applications of new sensors
such as optical fibre sensors, piezoelectric sensors, MEMS sensors, wireless
sensing system etc. for aircraft structural health monitoring. The experimental
works have been carried out in laboratory conditions and some more works are
required to integrate the sensors to the structures effectively, determination of
optimum number of sensors and their location and enhancement of the reliability
of the sensors in order to survive the rugged environments.
In [8] a structural health monitoring system using wireless sensor network
consisting of 17 sensor nodes, a base station and a processing computer has been
implemented. The acceleration data synchronously sampled from each sensor
node are transported to a data processing computer through a base station. A time
division multiple access (TDMA) approach has been proposed to reduce the
packet collision and energy consumption.
The experimental works on the design and implementation of an innovative
technological framework for monitoring critical structures in Italy has been
reported [9]. The use of wireless sensors networks allowed for a pervasive
observation over the sites of interest to minimize the potential damages that
natural phenomenon may cause to architectural or engineering works. The
temperature, relative humidity, linear strain and 3-axis acceleration sensors are
used for the measurement of observed parameters.
A SHM flexible testbed system has been developed for detecting high-velocity
impacts in the skin of a structure [10]. The system is a large sensor network
containing about two hundred nodes, each of which contains multiple sensors. The
testbed is used for studying wide range of SHM applications.
The configurations of a novel wireless system for infrastructure health
monitoring has been proposed and developed with a special attention to the low
frequency characteristics of the wireless transmission [11].
Sensors and Technologies for Structural Health Monitoring: A Review 3

Sensors deployed for monitoring bridges, buildings etc. always face a
constraint from energy consideration. A novel wireless sensor system has been
presented in [12] that harvests vibrations of the bridge created by passing traffic,
which is converted into usable energy by means of a linear electromagnetic
generator. In the particular design [12], harvesting of power up to 12.5 mW in the
resonant mode with an excitation frequency of 3.1 Hz has been reported.
A field study of monitoring the ambient vibration using 60 accelerometers
interfaced with 30 wireless sensor nodes operating within one or two
simultaneously star topology network has been reported [13]. It is envisioned that
the reported system can address short-term and long-term management and
condition assessment needs for highway bridges.
In [14], a novel sensor network architecture for SHM has been presented. The
system is based on contactless sensors that make use of near-field coupling to both
sense the structure displacement and deploy a local communication network.
A simple custom-built gages based detection of cracks in critical structural
elements and its design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a WSN
for real-time SHM has been reported [15]. The paper [15] has shown that a variety
of low-cost, off-the-shelf data acquisition/communication devices can be used to
support remote monitoring by a control centre. The assessment of the developed
system done for a full-scale three-story reinforced concrete building that was
tested under lateral forces emulating forces induced by earthquakes.
P.F.dC. Antunes et. al., [16] have reported the implementation of an optical
accelerometer unit based on fiber Bragg gratings, suitable to monitor structures
with frequencies up to 45 Hz. The developed system has been used to estimate the
eigenfrequencies of a steel foot bridge structure of total length of 300 m.
Bragg grating-based optical fiber sensors integrated into carbon fiber polymer
reinforcement (CFPR) rod have been used to measure strains in concrete
structures [17]. It has been concluded from experimental results that the effective
strain measurement can be obtained from the different sensors mounted along the
rod. From the results it can be concluded that in-situ monitoring of strains in
different engineering structure is possible.
In [18] comparative test results between the performance of electrical resistance
strain gauges (ERSG) and fiber-optic sensors (FOS) based on in-fiber Bragg
grating technology for monitoring health of structures are reported. The results
have shown a close comparison of the data obtained between different methods of
strain measurement.
Micro-Opto-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MOEMS) acoustic sensors have
been employed to detect acoustic emissions (AE) for Structural Health Monitoring
(SHM) [19].
Acoustic sensing cantilevers (~ 200 x 100 x 50 μm) with variable frequency
response, directionality and dynamic range have been fabricated in large quantity
using a novel non-silicon process. The packaged sensors are low-cost, easy-to-
install and ElectroMagnetic Interference (EMI) free during operation. The acoustic
sensors’ broadband sensitivity is demonstrated by standard structural break tests.
A wireless embedded system that performs active ultrasonic SHM has been
reported in [20]. The proposed Shimmer platform is an autonomous, battery-less