The project is the first phase of a rapidly deployable Wireless Data Acquisition system for surveillance of long-term structural health of critical infrastructure components such as bridges, tunnels, buildings, pipelines, etc. The system described herein uses Crossbow Mica2 motes to implement a wireless, autonomous, graphical Internet display of data collected from sensors at an arbitrary number of locations within a structure. There are two critical components of long-term structural health monitoring: acquiring sensor response and communicating these data in a timely fashion. Both of these components consume power, and thus power consumption becomes a critical aspect of any wireless system designed for long-term use. Careful selection of sensors and optimization of communication schemes will allow sustained operation of the Wireless Data Acquisition system for a year or more.

The Wireless Data Acquisition system is an extension of ongoing projects in Internet-enabled remote monitoring of critical infrastructure at the Infrastructure Technology Institute and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. The overall objective of Internet-enabled remote monitoring is to provide timely information to parties interested in the structural health of critical infrastructure components. Sensors on a structure are polled regularly so that responses may be compared graphically with past readings to identify trends and automatically alert authorities of impending problems. The main drawback of such a system of sensors is the extreme cost in labor and materials for installation, wiring, and maintenance of such a system. The natural extension of these wired systems is a wireless system that drastically reduces the cost of installation and eliminates the impact of the sensor network on the day to day use of a structure.