Developing a Wireless Two-dimensional Image-based Crack Sensor for Concrete Structures

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in assessing the health condition of Civil Infrastructure using wireless smart sensors network (WSSN) in recent years. The WSSN technology enables an evolutionary improvement of the mobility, cost efficiency and significantly reduction of installation effort by releasing the data acquisition system from extensive wiring, which benefits the development of localized monitoring such as crack propagation measurement. In this paper, the specification and the design of a new smart wireless two-dimensional crack sensor using image processing technique is presented. The sensor is able to measure two-dimensional crack propagation automatically which cannot be easily done by other crack sensors. In addition, the adoption of low-power microcontroller and wireless module simplifies the sensor installation and allows distributed monitoring strategy for sensor deployment on large scale civil structures. The progress of development, including hardware design, laboratory tests and computer simulation are presented in this paper.