An All-Digital Low-Power Structural Health Monitoring System

Structural health monitoring is desirable in many fields to provide a means of damage detection on a variety of structures. Unfortunately, the ability to equip structures with health monitoring systems is limited by the development of adequate hardware. Previously, prototypes using the impedance-based health monitoring method have been developed to lay a foundation for permanent structural damage detection. These prototypes served their purposes, but has shortcomings such that large size and high power consumption. In this paper, all-digital excitation and sensing techniques are developed to reduce both the size and power dissipation. The digital techniques are implemented onto a new prototype, which achieves substantial reduction in size and power consumption. Validation of the new hardware on a representative structure is presented and compared with traditional techniques for structural health monitoring.