Wireless sensor network for on-line structural health monitoring

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is of great significance for ensuring the using functions, safety operation of buildings and extending service lifetime of buildings. The structural damage detection is the main work of the structural health monitoring. In this paper, we proposed a new online structural damage detection method called N-stage Kalman Filter Algorithm (NS-Kalman). Its main idea is to divide a large building structure into several sub-structures. Every substructure will collect sensor data within its range and process the data with the NS-kalman. Finally, detection result will be got. According to the requirements of the structural damage detection algorithm, this paper proposes using a cluster-type wireless sensor network based on Zigbee protocol to build a SHM system, which adapts to the algorithm. Experiments show that the system has good real-time capacity and lower energy consumption.