A Wireless Sensor Network with Enhanced Power Efficiency and Embedded Strain Cycle Identification for Fatigue Monitoring of Railway Bridges

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have been shown to be a cost-effective monitoring tool for many applications on civil structures. Strain cycle monitoring for fatigue life assessment of railway bridges, however, is still a challenge since it is data intensive and requires a reliable operation for several weeks or months. In addition, sensing with electrical resistance strain gauges is expensive in terms of energy consumption. The induced reduction of battery lifetime of sensor nodes increases the maintenance costs and reduces the competitiveness of wireless sensor networks. To overcome this drawback, a signal conditioning hardware was designed that is able to significantly reduce the energy consumption. Furthermore, the communication overhead is reduced to a sustainable level by using an embedded data processing algorithm that extracts the strain cycles from the raw data. Finally, a simple software triggering mechanism that identifies events enabled the discrimination of useful measurements from idle data, thus increasing the efficiency of data processing. The wireless monitoring system was tested on a railway bridge for two weeks. The monitoring system demonstrated a good reliability and provided high quality data.