Wireless data acquisition system for health monitoring of civil infrastructure

The deterioration of reinforced concrete structures such as highways, bridges and buildings is a major problem. Current Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems employ conventional cables to allow sensors to communicate with remote base station. Cable based monitoring systems have high installation costs. There is a critical need of wireless data acquisition system to transmit data efficiently from the remote site to the base station to reduce the overall cost of the SHM system. In this thesis we developed an inexpensive wireless data acquisition system which consists of data logger to collect the analog sensor data and compactRF(TM) transceiver to transmit the data wirelessly to the base station. The key features of this data acquisition system are that it is easy to configure, easy to deploy at remote site and compatibility with the sensors. Also two emerging wireless technologies Bluetooth and Zigbee in the field of SHM are discussed briefly.