Energy Management and Task Scheduling of an Energy Harvesting, Structural Health Monitoring System

Monitoring certain features of a structure over time and evaluating these features to determine the health of a structure is referred to as Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). SHiMmer, a solar-powered wireless SHM system, monitors a structure, processes the results, and transmits the data to an external device. In this paper, we examine the components of SHiMmer and reveal both its capabilities and limitations. We describe an energy management simulation that will prove to be important in SHiMmer’s future. We test the three task components, integrate the XBee API operation into the communication task, and measure the energy consumption for two tasks.