Memscon project: wireless sensor network for post-earthquake evaluation of concrete buildings

Rapid advances in computation, sensing and data transmission techniques, such as RFID technology, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and low power wireless networking offer hope of a new generation of small and inexpensive networked sensors. These can be distributed on buildings and structures to provide accurate quantitative information on the structure's physical state while in service. The aim of the EU-funded MEMSCON project is to develop MEMS-based sensors for structural monitoring and to integrate them with a Decision Support System that will use the information from the above sensors to aid evaluation of reinforced concrete buildings. This will be done both before and after earthquakes, to aid decisions on improvement and repair. Although today the appraisal of seismic damage is almost exclusively based on visual inspection, measuring quantitatively the response of buildings during and after an earthquake, in terms of acceleration and strain, is an easy task. However structure owners are somehow reluctant to install permanent sensing systems, due to both their high costs and the difficulty of interpreting the data. To overcome these limitations, the MEMSCON project aims to produce a small size sensing node, integrating MEMS-based sensors and an RFID tag in a single package. Such nodes can then be attached to reinforced concrete buildings for life-cycle measurements of acceleration and strain, with data transmitted to a remote base station using a wireless interface. These nodes will allow economically sustainable industrial deployment of structural monitoring systems. This paper presents the development of the first prototypes of strain and acceleration sensors, and their validation in the laboratory.