Measuring Relative-Story Displacement and Local Inclination Angle Using Multiple Position-Sensitive Detectors

We propose a novel sensor system for monitoring the structural health of a building. The system optically measures the relative-story displacement during earthquakes for detecting any deformations of building elements. The sensor unit is composed of three position sensitive detectors (PSDs) and lenses capable of measuring the relative-story displacement precisely, even if the PSD unit was inclined in response to the seismic vibration. For verification, laboratory tests were carried out using an Xθ-stage and a shaking table. The static experiment verified that the sensor could measure the local inclination angle as well as the lateral displacement. The dynamic experiment revealed that the accuracy of the sensor was 150 μm in the relative-displacement measurement and 100 μrad in the inclination angle measurement. These results indicate that the proposed sensor system has sufficient accuracy for the measurement of relative-story displacement in response to the seismic vibration

IEEE 802.11-Based Wireless Sensor System for Vibration Measurement

Network-based wireless sensing has become an important area of research and various new applications for remote sensing are expected to emerge. One of the promising applications is structural health monitoring of building or civil engineering structure and it often requires vibration measurement. For the vibration measurement via wireless network, time synchronization is indispensable. In this paper, we introduce a newly developed time synchronized wireless sensor network system. The system employs IEEE 802.11 standard-based TSF-counter and sends the measured data with the counter value. TSF based synchronization enables consistency on common clock among different wireless nodes. We consider the scale effect on synchronization accuracy and evaluated the effect by taking beacon collisions into account. The scalability issue by numerical simulations is also studied. This paper also introduces a newly developed wireless sensing system and the hardware and software specifications are introduced. The experiments were conducted in a reinforced concrete building to evaluate synchronization accuracy. The developed system was also applied for a vibration measurement of a 22-story steel structured high rise building. The experimental results showed that the system performed more than sufficiently

Time synchronized wireless sensor network and its application to building vibration measurement

Abstract: Network based wireless sensing has become an important area of research and various new applications for remote sensing are expected to emerge. One of the promising applications is structural health monitoring of building or civil engineering structure and it often requires vibration measurement. For the vibration measurement via wireless network, time synchronization is indispensable. In this paper, we introduce a newly developed time synchronized wireless sensor network system. The system employs IEEE 802.11 standard based TSF counter and sends the measured data with the counter value. It enables consistency on common clock among different wireless nodes. We describe the accuracy evaluation by simulation studies when the size of nodes increased. The hardware and software specifications of the developed wireless sensing system are shown. The experiments were conducted in a three-story reinforced concrete building and results showed the system performs more than sufficiently