Distributed network-based structural health monitoring expert system

Abstract

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a process of detecting damages to engineering structures. The goal of SHM is to improve both the safety and reliability of infrastructures such as buildings, bridges, and highways. Several efforts have been made to develop improved SHM systems. However, most of these studies only considered vibration as a monitoring parameter without incorporating expert systems based on fuzzy inference. In this work, an expert system was incorporated into SHM for monitoring residential buildings based on building temperature and vibration measurements. The developed system used a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) with a 2.4 GHz Radio Frequency (RF) band. Results of the system performance evaluation indicated a decrease in reliability from 99% to 50% within a decade of its deployment. In terms of energy conservation, results showed that the system was able to save 30% of energy, thereby increasing its lifetime. The fuzzy expert SHM system is able to detect building conditions with a good level of reliability, energy conservation capability and high accuracy of 94.4% and 100% as the least and best performance, respectively. Hence, direct integration of this system into building structures could aid early detection of building impairment.