Development of Smart Structural System for Civil Infrastructure: Sensing and Control

In recent years, the techniques of structural sensing and control are used to mitigate the effects of natural hazards on civil infrastructure. The objective of this study is to improve traditional structural sensing and control systems of civil engineering by applying the technologies of embedded system and wireless sensing, and implements the concept of smart structural system on building. Two systems are provided in this study, Smart Sensing System and Smart Control Device.
Recently, the techniques of embedded system and wireless communication have attracted much research interest. The main idea of embedded system is Hardware-Software Co-Design which is a simultaneous design of both hardware and software to implement in a desired function. Wireless communication technology provides a low-cost, flexible and reconfigurable architecture to replace the traditional wired communication.
The development of Smart Sensing System includes a newly developed wireless sensing unit (NTU-WSU) and a Host Node with real-time controller (cRIO) to perform the sensing procedures, and several structural health monitoring techniques (AR, FDD, SSI and two-stage AR-ARX damage detection) are surveyed to extract structural characteristics. Two-layer wireless communication architecture which includes wireless sensor network and 3G Mobile Internet is built in Smart Sensing System. This system is adopted in the measurement of Gi-Lu Bridge and Niudou Bridge and the result shows the high robustness of wireless sensing system and the structural characteristics are accurately extracted through the provided SHM methods.
The development of Smart Control Device includes a newly developed decentralized control algorithm (decentralize sliding mode control) and a new embedded system which is designed for this specified control algorithm. This system is verified with a shaking table test and the control performance indices show Smart Control Device reduces the structural responses effectively.