A Wirelessly Preemptive Sensing System for Quasi-Realtime Earthquake Monitoring of Bridges

Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA

Investigators

Abstract

Measuring the earthquake response of a bridge is an important function for low power wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Past experience with the current generation of WSNs demonstrated that earthquakes have hit an instrumented bridge and the network completely missed it because it was either in energy-saving sleep mode or transferring ambient data that was collected prior to the earthquake. The research objectives of this project are to test the hypothesis that a wireless sensor network capable of being preemptively triggered can capture the critical dynamic response of a bridge during and after an earthquake, and that it can conduct distributed modal identification so that the agility of damage characterization and the efficiency of energy consumption of the bridge monitoring system can be improved. The impact of the project will be in advancing discovery, multi-disciplinary collaboration, teaching, and training. The proposed research will enable bridge monitoring not previously possible by conventional methods, which contributes to protecting society through transformative improvements in methods for timely detection of bridge response to earthquakes.