The basic objective of this effort is to research an active sensing system, including damage detection firmware, telemetry and a power harvesting ability to produce a stand alone, active wireless sensor technology. In addition it is proposed to generalize this sample device to produce an analytical procedure to define the requisite physical properties of such a sensing system (e.g. sensor type, number, sensitivity, bandwidth, power) for general structural health monitoring and damage prognosis (SHM/DP) problems. The tasks in performing this research are: (1) Determine the physical limits and parameters for power harvesting of ambient vibration energy in terms of measures such as frequency content, amplitude, transducer geometry, configuration and placement. (2) Determine the physical limits and parameters for power harvesting of ambient temperature in terms of measures such as gradient, minimum and maximum temperature. (3) Determine the key parameters governing the energy limits for transmitting information, for computing, and for exciting the structure with a known input as related to a specific SHM/DP algorithm. (4) Determine the key parameters for power consumption for computing such as analog digital conversions and algorithm requirements. (5) Experimentally demonstrate the proposed self-contained sensing system.
This is a project supported under the Sensors Initiative NSF 04-522.
