Wireless Inclinometer Sensor and Its Data Acquisition System for Swing Monitoring of Large Scale Structures

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has been an important research area for evaluating and designing reliability of engineering structures in recent years. And with recent advances in the technologies in sensing, wireless communication, and micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS), wireless sensor technique has been developed rapidly and used gradually in the SHM for engineering structures. In this paper, wireless inclinometer sensor and its Data Acquisition System(DAS) for swing monitoring of large scale structures are designed. Firstly, a kind of wireless inclinometer acquisition system structure is introduced. Secondly, the sensing unit MEME SCA100T's principles and design are discussed in detail, the development of wireless communication module and power unit are given, and all hardware units are integrated into a wireless inclinometer sensor node. Thirdly, the data acquisition system software, which can finish such the functions as data collection, data FFT, is designed. Finally, Experimental results are given to show the feasibility of the developed wireless inclinometer sensor and its data acquisition system.