SBIR Phase I: Civil Structure Health Monitoring using Wireless Acoustic Emission Sensors

该SBIR第一阶段研究方案将通过将民用基础设施维护从基于时间的维护转变为基于条件的维护来推进最先进的基础设施维护，将最先进的声发射(AE)技术从现有的基于传统个人计算机的平台推进到自主的本地化平台，开发一种新型的传感器节点，该传感器节点可以实时处理高带宽的AE数据，但具有低功耗并在休眠模式下检测AE事件，设计具有高精度的时间同步协议以实现跨传感器节点的AE事件的关联，支持网络周期性协同唤醒，功耗开销低，制定可靠的数据采集协议，确保所有AE检测数据高概率下发到数据宿。到目前为止，该公司为客户检查的每一座钢桥都存在未发现、未检测、已记录和已修复的疲劳裂缝。根据这些被检查的桥梁和桥梁工程师的反馈，可以安全地假设美国大多数钢桥包含未检测到的疲劳裂纹、已知裂纹扩展速率未知的疲劳裂纹以及修复/加固的疲劳裂纹。所提出的技术将为实时检测和监测疲劳裂纹活动提供一种经济有效的技术。IT S预计，无线系统的交付成本将比传统的基于PC的方法低两个数量级。因此，桥梁所有者/运营商将能够以当前的维护预算多监测两个数量级的桥梁，这将提高公共安全。

This SBIR Phase I research proposal will advance the state-of-the-art by transforming civil infrastructure maintenance from time based to condition based, advance the state-of-the art in Acoustic Emission (AE) technology from the existing legacy personal computer based platform to an autonomous localized platform, develop a novel sensor node that can process high-bandwidth AE data in real-time, yet have low-power consumption and detect AE events in sleep mode, devise a time synchronization protocol that has high precision to enable the correlation of AE events across sensor nodes, support the periodic coordinated wake up of the network and have low overhead in terms of power consumption and develop a reliable data collection protocol that ensures that all AE detection data is delivered to the data sink at a high probability. There are undetected, detected and documented, and repaired fatigue cracks in every steel bridge that the company has inspected for their clients to date. Based on these inspected bridges and feedback from bridge engineers it is safe to assume that the majority of steel bridges in the U.S contain undetected fatigue cracks, known fatigue cracks with unknown crack propagation rates, and repaired/reinforced fatigues cracks that are not dormant. The proposed technology will offer a cost effective technology to detect and monitor fatigue crack activity in real-time. It s expected that the wireless system will be deliverable at two orders of magnitude cheaper than the conventional PC based approach. As a result, bridge owner/operators will be able to monitor two orders of magnitude more bridges at current maintenance budgets which translates into increased public safety.