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Monuments' Structural Monitoring – phase 1 technical report
Ref: HURRAY-TR-100401       Publication Date: 28, Apr, 2010

Abstract:
The cultural heritage of many cities is greatly defined by their historic buildings, thus its preservation is of the upmost importance. The need of preserving historical constructions is not only a cultural requirement but also a safety, economical and developmental demand. Structural dynamic monitoring studies are a key aspect to carry out an effective maintenance of such structures and this has been traditionally achieved by using wire-based data acquisition equipment. As damage is a local phenomenon and in order to achieve high accuracy, it is important to monitor the structural behaviour at fine-grained level. Thus, a sufficiently large number of measuring points is necessary. This approach however, becomes inadequate in cases where there are aesthetic concerns or in others, when the use of wires may difficult the management and deployment of the data acquisition infrastructure. Moreover, currently available systems are considerably expensive and the installation time of such can consume over 75% of the total testing time, with the installation labour costs easily over passing 25% of the total system cost. Such costs can be greatly reduced with the implementation of Micro Electric Mechanical Systems (MEMS) based sensors integrated in Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN). This document, describes the complete engineering process (from system specification to physical implementation) of a WSN based distributed system to carry out the structural health monitoring of historical masonry constructions.

Ricardo F. T. Gomes

,

Ricardo Severino

,

Paulo Gandra de Sousa