Flexible Smart Sensor Network for Structural Health Monitoring

Virtual EM INC. in collaboration with Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) proposes to develop a highly expandable, lightweight and flexible sensor network for structural health monitoring (SHM) by directly addressing the roadblocks of high size, weight, and power requirements and high communication bandwidth. CWRU has recently advanced the state-of-the-art by developing and testing a custom front-end IC using commercial 0.5 m complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology that contains both a programmable transmitter (waveform generator) and a receiver suitable for a range of active SHM applications with an active area of only 0.55 mm x 1.1 mm. To reduce communication bandwidth, we propose the use data processing within each node. Each processor will process the raw data and output low data rates. Such information can be transmitted to control nodes at much lower data rates than the raw waveforms, thus resulting in a highly-scalable network.