Compressive sensing for efficient health monitoring and effective damage detection of structures

Real world Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems consist of sensors in the scale of hundreds, each sensor generating extremely large amounts of data, often arousing the issue of the cost associated with data transfer and storage. Sensor energy is a major component included in this cost factor, especially in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Data compression is one of the techniques that is being explored to mitigate the effects of these issues. In contrast to traditional data compression techniques, Compressive Sensing (CS) - a very recent development - introduces the means of accurately reproducing a signal by acquiring much less number of samples than that defined by Nyquist's theorem. CS achieves this task by exploiting the sparsity of the signal. By the reduced amount of data samples, CS may help reduce the energy consumption and storage costs associated with SHM systems. This paper investigates CS based data acquisition in SHM, in particular, the implications of CS on damage detection and localization. CS is implemented in a simulation environment to compress structural response data from a Reinforced Concrete (RC) structure. Promising results were obtained from the compressed data reconstruction process as well as the subsequent damage identification process using the reconstructed data. A reconstruction accuracy of 99% could be achieved at a Compression Ratio (CR) of 2.48 using the experimental data. Further analysis using the reconstructed signals provided accurate damage detection and localization results using two damage detection algorithms, showing that CS has not compromised the crucial information on structural damages during the compression process.