NOSS: An Integrated Power Aware Sensor-Simulation Network System for Long-Term Performance Assessment of Concrete Infrastructures

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

The performance of civil infrastructures plays an important role in maintaining the quality of life of the U.S. citizens as well as in the nation's defense systems. The project attacks several critical issues involved in the new generation of smart civil infrastructure system with built-in sensor network. Performance assessment of civil infrastructure is usually a long-term task (i.e. several years) the power supply for the sensor network becomes a problem, especially for the embedded sensors in structures. The first focus is to provide a reliable energy harvesting method for the sensors and a power management plan for the sensor network. For long-term performance assessment, processing the large amount of data obtained from the sensor network is a difficult and important task, the second focus is how to configure the sensor network and assemble the measured data in a more meaningful way in order to use the available information to predict future structural performance. To this end, this project is to develop an integrated Power Aware Sensor-Simulation Network system for long-term performance assessment of concrete infrastructures. The system consists of three subsystems including an energy harvesting and power management system for the sensors, a combined sensor-based numerical simulation system, and a massively parallel computing system for the numerical calculations. Built-in sensors have found their applications not only in civil, and aerospace structures, but also in mechanical engineering and medical devices such as artificial hearts. Therefore, the research will have a great impact in many areas of science and technologies.