Hydropower Structures Monitoring System with Hierarchically Distributed Smart Sensor Network

Traditionally, a remote monitoring system for the geotechnical instruments intended for surveillance of a hydropower structure is made using large concentrated data acquisition stations with a capacity of up to 256 measurement channels, connected to a local data acquisition server. This paper proposes a new hydropower structure monitoring system, based on a distributed architecture of smart sensor, organized as hierarchical sensor networks. Several developments are required in order to implement such a new system: development of a new family of network interfacing modules, implementation of a group of new smart wired and wireless sensors, implementation of a software application for configuring the sensor network, acquiring, visualizing and archiving data from sensors.