Seismic Data Compression and Integrated Structural Health Monitoring System

This paper presents a new concept for an integrated structural health monitoring (SHM) system and its potential use in seismic application. The integrated SHM system incorporates sensor data compression, interactive data retrieval and structural system identification to address the challenging issues arising from current SHM practice. Since rapid data analysis is highly desired during or immediately after strong earthquakes to enable rapid emergency relief and disaster assistance efforts, innovative sensor data compression techniques are needed to facilitate fast and reliable remote transmission of seismic data from monitored structures to central information processing station. Real sensor data measured from a prototype integrated SHM system which is comprised of a model steel bridge, a real-time data acquisition system with remote access were used in this study to demonstrate the concept for the integrated SHM system. The performance of the integrated SHM system with lossy data compression is also discussed in this paper.