Embedment of structural monitoring algorithms in a wireless sensing unit

Complementing recent advances made in the field of structural health monitoring and damage detection, the concept of a wireless sensing network with distributed computational power is proposed. The fundamental building block of the proposed sensing network is a wireless sensing unit capable of acquiring measurement data, interrogating the data and transmitting the data in real time. The computational core of a prototype wireless sensing unit can potentially be utilized for execution of embedded engineering analyses such as damage detection and system identification. To illustrate the computational capabilities of the proposed wireless sensing unit, the fast Fourier transform and autoregressive time-series modeling are locally executed by the unit. Fast Fourier transforms and autoregressive models are two important techniques that have been previously used for the identification of damage in structural systems. Their embedment illustrates the computational capabilities of the prototype wireless sensing unit and suggests strong potential for unit installation in automated structural health monitoring systems.