Structural Damage Detection and Localization Using NETSHM

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an important application area for wireless sensor networks. Recent work has examined the design of wireless sensor networks for structural data acquisition systems. The eventual goal of structural monitoring, however, is autonomous detection and localization of structural damage. Developing practical damage detection and localization schemes is still an area of active research and there exists a large array of techniques. Structural engineers typically implement and test SHM algorithms in a higher level language such as C/Matlab. Practical sensor network based SHM systems, thus, should allow structural engineers to program various SHM schemes in a higher level language that they are familiar with such as C/Matlab without delving into the intricacies of the underlying sensor network. In this paper we describe the design of NETSHM, a programmable, re-usable and evolvable sensor network system that can be used to implement a variety of structural monitoring techniques at a level of abstraction that structural engineers are comfortable with. We validate our design by implementing and evaluating a damage detection techniques and localization techniques on a NETSHM prototype