Structural health monitoring with wireless sensors to enhance sustainability in structural engineering

Acoustic emission techniques (AET) are an alternative monitoring method to investigate the status of a bridge or some of its components. It has the potential to detect defects in terms of cracks occurring during the routine use of bridges. A monitoring system for large structures is developed based on a new kind of MEMS sensors as well as conventional sensors requiring just very low power. Besides the sensors the recording and analysis technique needs powerful algorithms to handle and to reduce the immense amount of data. Systems developed for structural health monitoring use embedded network techniques along with wireless communication and MEMS. Algorithms to reduce the amount of data and to enable the localization of damage areas by array techniques have to be developed. The paper is giving an overview about data processing and analysis techniques needed for wireless sensor networks with respect to structural health monitoring. The focus is especially in the field of acoustic emission techniques where often a large amount of data must be processed.