THE STUDY OF THE ENGINEERING STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING SYSTEM BASED ON THE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Civil engineering structures in the long-term use process will inevitably produce the damage due to the effects of the various natural and anthropogenic factors, and the damage can endanger the structural safety when approaching a certain extent; therefore, it is necessary to establish the engineering structural health monitoring system to implement the uninterrupted monitoring and assessing of the engineering structural health status. However, in an engineering structural monitoring system, there are often hundreds of the various test sensors and the long distances among the various sensor nodes, and monitoring environmental conditions may be very dangerous, so it is almost impossible to lay a large number of signal cables. Since the advent of wireless sensor, it is quick applied to the military, industry and other fields due to the numerous advantages, such as the high flexibilities, the good fault tolerance, the high detection accuracy, the low cost, the rapid deployment, etc., and the above problems can be also solved quite easily. Therefore, this paper presents the frame of the engineering structural health monitoring system based on the wireless sensor networks(WSN), which consists of four subsystems, i.e., the wireless sensor nodes subsystem, the sink nodes subsystem, the remote communication subsystem and the monitoring centre subsystem, and gives, in more detail, the functional modules of the software and hardware in four subsystems; and finally it raises some problems urgent needing to be improved in the structural health monitoring system.