Applications of structural health monitoring technology in Asia

Asia is the largest and most populous continent in the world with over 45 million square kilometers of land mass and 4.5 billion people. Asia is characterized by numerous densely populated cities. Structural health monitoring is a non-issue for the underdeveloped countries where basic amenities of survival are more important. However, structural health monitoring is crucial for the developing countries, especially those with densely populated cities like Singapore, Mumbai, and Hong Kong, where any infrastructural failure could be devastating to their society and economy. Structural health monitoring of mechanical and aerospace structures is mostly similar worldwide, but of civil infrastructures could vary due to socio-economic, cultural, geographical, and governmental reasons across countries, and even across states within the same country. This article, which is an enhancement to the keynote paper of the International Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring (IWSHM 2015, Stanford University, USA), presents some of the better known structural health monitoring studies of key civil infrastructures in a few Asian countries. In addition, the authors’ research and applications of structural health monitoring technology carried out at the Nanyang Technological University for civil infrastructures in Singapore are presented. At the end, the authors also discuss recent work on energy harvesting using piezoelectric transducers as an alternative to wired structural health monitoring for automated and self-powered structural health monitoring.