DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF A LOW-COST WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK FOR SHM

In recent decades, health monitoring for civil infrastructures has assumed a crucial role to identify degradation phenomena and structural issues. The technological advancement in the field of informatics and electronics has allowed moving from discrete and partial control of the structural conditions to continuous and complete structural health monitoring (SHM). However, the high costs of the instrumentation have prevented wide adoption of this new approach. A low-cost, wireless and easy-to-install accelerometric instrumentation network, properly developed for ambient vibration testing in the SHM field, is presented in this paper. The effectiveness of this network has been validated by applying it to an existing prestressed RC bridge and performing a modal identification by several operational modal analysis (OMA) techniques. A comparison between these results, the analytical prediction and previous tests by commercial and more sophisticated devices allow asserting the proper functioning of the instrumentation.