EACS 2016 Paper No. 197
Sensor technological enhancement and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) meet together nowadays in the concept of Smart Cities, i.e. cities that offer an additional value to their inhabitants and visitors, such as monitored safety of infrastructures. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) appeared as a tool for structural diagnosis of buildings or civil engineering facilities, for both static and dynamic behaviours. Early applications required difficult and costly experimental setups. However, new sensor typologies, such fibre optics or MEMS, and wireless communications offer today a whole new scenario of possibilities, such as the permanent seismic monitoring of historical heritage. Nonetheless, the design of a SHM system often comprises a numerical model representative of the monitored structure, and useful for a better selection of the characteristics and location of each sensor. This approach is usually slow and costly, hence simplified criteria are proposed here to make a rapid preliminary design of a dynamic SHM system based on the evaluation of dynamic parameters (e.g. modal participation factors or natural frequencies). The design methodology is illustrated through its use in the development of a distributed network of monitored structures at L’Aquila.
