A wireless MEMS-based inclinometer sensor node for structural health monitoring

This paper proposes a wireless inclinometer sensor node for structural health monitoring (SHM) that can be applied to civil engineering and building structures subjected to various loadings. The inclinometer used in this study employs a method for calculating the tilt based on the difference between the static acceleration and the acceleration due to gravity, using a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS)-based accelerometer. A wireless sensor node was developed through which tilt measurement data are wirelessly transmitted to a monitoring server. This node consists of a slave node that uses a short-distance wireless communication system (RF 2.4 GHz) and a master node that uses a long-distance telecommunication system (code division multiple access-CDMA). The communication distance limitation, which is recognized as an important issue in wireless monitoring systems, has been resolved via these two wireless communication components. The reliability of the proposed wireless inclinometer sensor node was verified experimentally by comparing the values measured by the inclinometer and subsequently transferred to the monitoring server via wired and wireless transfer methods to permit a performance evaluation of the wireless communication sensor nodes. The experimental results indicated that the two systems (wired and wireless transfer systems) yielded almost identical values at a tilt angle greater than 1°, and a uniform difference was observed at a tilt angle less than 0.42° (approximately 0.0032° corresponding to 0.76% of the tilt angle, 0.42°) regardless of the tilt size. This result was deemed to be within the allowable range of measurement error in SHM. Thus, the wireless transfer system proposed in this study was experimentally verified for practical application in a structural health monitoring system.