• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.19 no.1
• /
• pp.1-10
• /
• 2017

The operation of subway trains induces secondary structure-borne vibrations in the nearby underground spaces. The vibration, along with the associated noise, can cause annoyance and adverse physical, physiological, and psychological effects on humans in dense urban environments. Traditional tethered instruments restrict the rapid measurement and assessment on such vibration effect. This paper presents a novel approach for Wireless Smart Sensor (WSS)-based autonomous evaluation system for the subway train-induced vibrations. The system was implemented on a MEMSIC's Imote2 platform, using a SHM-H high-sensitivity accelerometer board stacked on top. A new embedded application VibrationLevelCalculation, which determines the International Organization for Standardization defined weighted acceleration level, was added into the Illinois Structural Health Monitoring Project Service Toolsuite. The system was verified in a large underground space, where a nearby subway station is a good source of ground excitation caused by the running subway trains. Using an on-board processor, each sensor calculated the distribution of vibration levels within the testing zone, and sent the distribution of vibration level by radio to display it on the central server. Also, the raw time-histories and frequency spectrum were retrieved from the WSS leaf nodes. Subsequently, spectral vibration levels in the one-third octave band, characterizing the vibrating influence of different frequency components on human bodies, was also calculated from each sensor node. Experimental validation demonstrates that the proposed system is efficient for autonomously evaluating the subway train-induced ambient vibration of underground spaces, and the system holds the potential of greatly reducing the laboring of dynamic field testing.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.18 no.5
• /
• pp.885-909
• /
• 2016

Advances in low-cost wireless sensing have made instrumentation of large civil infrastructure systems with dense arrays of wireless sensors possible. A critical issue with regard to effective use of the information harvested from these sensors is synchronized sensing. Although a number of synchronization methods have been developed, most provide only clock synchronization. Synchronized sensing requires not only clock synchronization among wireless nodes, but also synchronization of the data. Existing synchronization protocols are generally limited to networks of modest size in which all sensor nodes are within a limited distance from a central base station. The scale of civil infrastructure is often too large to be covered by a single wireless sensor network. Multiple independent networks have been installed, and post-facto synchronization schemes have been developed and applied with some success. In this paper, we present a new approach to achieving synchronized sensing among multiple networks using the Pulse-Per-Second signals from low-cost GPS receivers. The method is implemented and verified on the Imote2 sensor platform using TinyOS to achieve $50{\mu}s$ synchronization accuracy of the measured data for multiple networks. These results demonstrate that the proposed approach is highly-scalable, realizing precise synchronized sensing that is necessary for effective structural health monitoring.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.6 no.5_6
• /
• pp.689-709
• /
• 2010

In this paper, a low cost, low power but multifunctional wireless sensor node is presented for the impedance-based SHM using piezoelectric sensors. Firstly, a miniaturized impedance measuring chip device is utilized for low cost and low power structural excitation/sensing. Then, structural damage detection/sensor self-diagnosis algorithms are embedded on the on-board microcontroller. This sensor node uses the power harvested from the solar energy to measure and analyze the impedance data. Simultaneously it monitors temperature on the structure near the piezoelectric sensor and battery power consumption. The wireless sensor node is based on the TinyOS platform for operation, and users can take MATLAB$^{(R)}$ interface for the control of the sensor node through serial communication. In order to validate the performance of this multifunctional wireless impedance sensor node, a series of experimental studies have been carried out for detecting loose bolts and crack damages on lab-scale steel structural members as well as on real steel bridge and building structures. It has been found that the proposed sensor nodes can be effectively used for local wireless health monitoring of structural components and for constructing a low-cost and multifunctional SHM system as "place and forget" wireless sensors.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
• /
• v.15 no.11
• /
• pp.846-850
• /
• 2009

Recently, wireless sensor networks have found their way into a wide variety of applications and systems with vastly varying requirements and characteristics such as environmental monitoring, smart spaces, medical applications, and precision agriculture. The sensor nodes are battery powered. Therefore, the energy is the most precious resource of a wireless sensor network since periodically replacing the battery of the nodes in large scale deployments is infeasible. Energy efficient mechanisms for gathering sensor readings are indispensable to prolong the lifetime of a sensor network as long as possible. There are two energy-efficient approaches to prolong the network lifetime in sensor networks. One is the compression scheme to reduce the size of sensor readings. When the communication conflict is occurred between two sensor nodes, the sender must try to retransmit its reading. The other is the MAC protocol to prevent the communication conflict. In this paper, we propose a novel approaches to reduce the size of the sensor readings in the MAC layer. The proposed scheme compresses sensor readings by allocating the time slots of the TDMA schedule to them dynamically. We also present a mathematical model to predict latency from collecting the sensor readings as the compression ratio is changed. In the simulation result, our proposed scheme reduces the communication cost by about 52% over the existing scheme.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.16 no.4
• /
• pp.607-621
• /
• 2015

Wireless sensor technology has been opened up numerous opportunities to advanced health and maintenance monitoring of civil infrastructure. Compare to the traditional tactics, it offers a better way of providing relevant information regarding the condition of building structure health at a lower price. Numerous domestic buildings, especially longer-span buildings have a low frequency response and challenging to measure using deployed numbers of sensors. The way the sensor nodes are connected plays an important role in providing the signals with required strengths. Out of many topologies, the dense and sparse topologies wireless sensor network were extensively used in sensor network applications for collecting health information. However, it is still unclear which topology is better for obtaining health information in terms of greatest components, node's size and degree. Theoretical and computational issues arising in the selection of the optimum topology sensor network for estimating coverage area with sensor placement in building structural monitoring are addressed. This work is an attempt to fill this gap in high-rise building structural health monitoring application. The result shows that, the sparse topology sensor network provides better performance compared with the dense topology network and would be a good choice for monitoring high-rise building structural health damage.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
• /
• v.20 no.4
• /
• pp.1133-1145
• /
• 1996

A method is proposed to predict the deformed shape of the structure subjected to the unknown external loads using the signal from the piezoceramic sensors. Such a shape estimation is based on the linear relationship between the deformation of structure and the signal from sensor, which is calculated using finite element method. The deformed shape is, then calculated using the linear matrix and the signals from the piezoceramic sensors attached to the structures. For the purpose, a structural analysis program is developed using a multi-layerd finite element of 8 nodes with 3 displacement and one voltage degrees of freedom at each node. The multiple layers with the different material properties can be layered within the element. The incompatible mode with the element is found to be crucial to catch the bending behavior accurately. The accuracy of the program is, then, verified by being compared with the experimental results performed by Crawley. The proposed shape estimation method is also verified for the different loads and sensor size. It is shown that the results of shape estimation method using the linear matrix well predicts the deflections compared with those of finite element method.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
• /
• v.5 no.2
• /
• pp.85-93
• /
• 2016

The existence of correlation characteristics brings significant potential advantages to the development of efficient routing protocols in wireless sensor networks. This research proposes a new simple method of clustering sensor nodes into correlation groups in multiple-correlation areas. At first, the evaluation of joint entropy for multiple-sensed data is considered. Based on the evaluation, the definition of correlation region, based on entropy theory, is proposed. Following that, a correlation clustering scheme with less computation is developed. The results are validated with a real data set.

• Advanced Industrial SCIence
• /
• v.2 no.1
• /
• pp.1-7
• /
• 2023

The use of Internet of Things(IoT) in smart cities and smart homes is essential. The security of the sensor nodes, which are the core of the IoT, is weak and hacking attacks are severe enough to have a fatal impact on real life. This research is conducted to improve the security of the Internet of Things by developing a lightweight secure communication protocol for the Internet of Things, and to build a safe Internet of Things environment suitable for the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution. It contributes to building a safe and convenient smart city and smart home by proposing key management and identifier development to increase the confidentiality of communication and the establishment of an Internet authentication system.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.263-275
• /
• 2010

In the last decade, wireless sensor networks have emerged as a promising technology that could accelerate progress in the field of structural monitoring. The main advantages of wireless sensor networks compared to conventional monitoring technologies are fast deployment, small interference with the surroundings, self-organization, flexibility and scalability. These features could enable mass application of monitoring systems, even on smaller structures. However, since wireless sensor network nodes are battery powered and data communication is the most energy consuming task, transferring all the acquired raw data through the network would dramatically limit system lifetime. Hence, data reduction has to be achieved at the node level in order to meet the system lifetime requirements of real life applications. The objective of this paper is to discuss some general aspects of data processing and management in monitoring systems based on wireless sensor networks, to present a prototype monitoring system for civil engineering structures, and to illustrate long-term field test results.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
• /
• v.16 no.2
• /
• pp.85-97
• /
• 2011

Wireless sensor networks have emerged as one of the key enabling technologies for ubiquitous computing since wireless intelligent sensor nodes connected by short range communication media serve as a smart intermediary between physical objects and people in ubiquitous computing environment. We recognize the wireless sensor network as a massively distributed and deeply embedded system. Such systems require concurrent and asynchronous event handling as a distributed system and resource-consciousness as an embedded system. Since the operating environment and architecture of wireless sensor networks, with the seemingly conflicting requirements, poses unique design challenges and constraints to developers, we propose a very new operating system for sensor nodes based on finite state machine. In this paper, we clarify the design goals reflected from the characteristics of sensor networks, and then present the heart of the design and implementation of a compact and efficient state-driven operating system, SenOS. We describe how SenOS can operate in an extremely resource constrained sensor node while providing the required reactivity and dynamic reconfigurability with low update cost. We also compare our experimental results after executing some benchmark programs on SenOS with those on TinyOS.