• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.360-365
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• 2019

A polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF)-based film speaker is successfully fabricated with enhanced bass sound by incorporating buckled nanospring carbon nanotubes (NS-CNTs) as fillers. Various concentrations up to 1-7 wt% of uniformly dispersed buckled NS-CNTs are loaded to increase the beta (β)-phase fraction, crystallinity, and dielectric constant of the speaker, and this results in the bass part enhancement of about 19 dB full scale (dBFS) at 7 wt% filler loading of the piezoelectric film speaker.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.477-496
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• 2013

Due to their cost-effectiveness and ease of installation, wireless smart sensors (WSS) have received considerable recent attention for structural health monitoring of civil infrastructure. Though various wireless smart sensor networks (WSSN) have been successfully implemented for full-scale structural health monitoring (SHM) applications, monitoring of low-level ambient strain still remains a challenging problem for WSS due to A/D converter (ADC) resolution, inherent circuit noise, and the need for automatic operation. In this paper, the design and validation of high-precision strain sensor board for the Imote2 WSS platform and its application to SHM of a cable-stayed bridge are presented. By accurate and automated balancing of the Wheatstone bridge, signal amplification of up to 2507-times can be obtained, while keeping signal mean close to the center of the ADC span, which allows utilization of the full span of the ADC. For better applicability to SHM for real-world structures, temperature compensation and shunt calibration are also implemented. Moreover, the sensor board has been designed to accommodate a friction-type magnet strain sensor, in addition to traditional foil-type strain gages, facilitating fast and easy deployment. The wireless strain sensor board performance is verified through both laboratory-scale tests and deployment on a full-scale cable-stayed bridge.