Asia is the largest and most populous continent in the world with about 45 million square kilometers of land mass and 4.5 billion people. It has 49 countries, including some of the rich like Japan, poor like Afghanistan and densely populated like Singapore. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a non-issue for the poor where basic amenities of survival are more important, but crucial for the rich and densely populated where any infra-structural failure could be devastating to their society and economy. SHM of mechanical and aerospace structures is mostly similar world-wide, but of civil infrastructures could varies due to socio-economical, cultural, geographical and governmental reasons across countries and even across provinces within the same country. This article introduces some of the better known SHM studies of key civil infrastructures in some of the Asian countries. In addition, the authors’ research and applications of SHM technology carried out at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) for civil infrastructures in Singapore is presented. At the end, we also discussed our recent work on energy harvesting using piezo electrics as an alternative to wired SHM for automated and self-powered SHM.
doi: 10.12783/SHM2015/1