Active sensing platform for wireless structural health monitoring

This paper presents SHiMmer, a wireless platform for sensing and actuation that combines localized processing with energy harvesting to provide long-lived structural health monitoring. The life-cycle of the node is significantly extended by the use of super-capacitors for energy storage instead of batteries. During this period the node is expected to work completely maintenance-free. The node is capable of harvesting up to 780J per day. This makes it completely selfsufficient while employed in real structural health monitoring applications. Unlike other sensor networks that periodically monitor a structure and route information to a base station, our device acquires the data and processes it locally after being radio-triggered by an external agent. The localized processing allows us to avoid issues due to network congestion. Our experiments show that its 32bits computational core can run at 100MIPS for 15 minutes daily. Categories and Subject Descriptors B.0 [Hardware]: general. Gener...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IPSN
• Authors: D. Musiani, K. Lin, Tajana Simunic Rosing
• Keywords: Energy Harvesting, IPSN 2007, Localized Processing, Sensor Networks, Structural Health Monitoring