Wireless smart sensor technology offers many opportunities to advance infrastructure monitoring and maintenance by providing pertinent information regarding the condition of a structure at a lower cost and higher density than traditional monitoring approaches. Many civil structures, especially long-span bridges, have low fundamental response frequencies that are challenging to accurately measure with sensors that are suitable for integration with low-cost, low-profile, and power-constrained wireless sensor networks. Existing displacement sensing technology is either not practical for wireless sensor implementations, does not provide the necessary accuracy, or is simply too cost-prohibitive for dense sensor deployments. This paper presents the development and integration of an accurate, low-cost radar-based sensor for the enhancement of low-frequency vibration-based bridge monitoring and the measurement of static bridge deflections. The sensors utilize both a nonlinear vibrometer mode and an arctangent-demodulated interferometry mode to achieve sub-millimeter measurement accuracy for both periodic and non-periodic displacement. Experimental validation results are presented and discussed.

Date Published: 13 April 2011
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 7981, Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2011, 79810K (13 April 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.879243

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7981:
Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2011
Masayoshi Tomizuka, Editor(s)