Wireless links for global positioning system receivers

Casciati, Fabio,Wu, Lijun Techno-Press 2012 Smart Structures and Systems, An International Jou Vol.10 No.1

Given an object, its positioning in the space is a main concern in structural monitoring and a required feedback in structural health monitoring, structural control and robotics. In addition, to make the sensor unit wireless is a crucial issue for advanced applications. This paper deals with the exploitation of wireless transmission technology to long-term monitoring GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers - like the Leica GMX 902 and the Leica GRX 1200-pro. These GPS receivers consist of five parts: antenna, receiver, user client computer, interface and power supply. The antenna is mounted on the object to be monitored and is connected with the receiver by a coaxial-cable through which the radio frequency signals are transmitted. The receiver unit acquires, tracks and demodulates the satellite signals and provides, through an interface which in this paper is made wireless, the resulting GPS raw data to the user client computer for being further processed by a suitable positioning algorithm. The power supply reaches the computer by a wired link, while the other modules rely on batteries re-charged by power harvesting devices. Two wireless transmission systems, the 24XStream and the CC1110, are applied to replace the cable transmission between the receiver and the user client computer which up to now was the only market offer. To verify the performance and the reliability of this wireless transmission system, some experiments are conducted. The results show a successful cable replacement.

Monitoring a steel building using GPS sensors

Fabio Casciati,Clemente Fuggini 국제구조공학회 2011 Smart Structures and Systems, An International Jou Vol.7 No.5

To assess the performance of a structure requires the measurement of global and relative displacements at critical points across the structure. They should be obtained in real time and in all weather condition. A Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) could satisfy the last two requirements. The American Global Position System (GPS) provides long term acquisitions with sampling rates sufficient to track the displacement of long period structures. The accuracy is of the order of sub-centimetres. The steel building which hosts the authors’ laboratory is the reference case-study within this paper. First a comparison of data collected by GPS sensor units with data recorded by tri-axial accelerometers is carried out when dynamic vibrations are induced in the structure by movements of the internal bridge-crane. The elaborations from the GPS position readings are then compared with the results obtained by a Finite Element (FE) numerical simulation. The purposes are: i) to realize a refinement of the structural parameters which characterize the building and ii) to outline a suitable way for processing GPS data toward structural monitoring.

Variability in mechanical properties and microstructure characterization of CuAlBe shape memory alloys for vibration mitigation

Fabio Casciati,Casper van der Eijk 국제구조공학회 2008 Smart Structures and Systems, An International Jou Vol.4 No.2

Shape memory alloys (SMA) have been emphasized, studied and understood in the controlled world of the laboratory. Any attempt to implement one of these alloys in engineered products requires a jump from the controlled world of the laboratory to the actual environment of the application. The first step is to move from single grain specimens to multigrain samples. One works with a material for which any stock is different from that previously available. This paper reviews the milestones in the familiarization process the authors had to overcome during their cooperation within a project funded by the European Union. The main items cover transformation temperatures, thermal treatment and properties understanding.

Sensor placement driven by a model order reduction (MOR) reasoning

Fabio Casciati,Lucia Faravelli 국제구조공학회 2014 Smart Structures and Systems, An International Jou Vol.13 No.3

Given a body undergoing a stress-strain status as consequence of external excitations, sensors can be deployed on the accessible lateral surface of the body. The sensor readings are regarded as input of a numerical model of reduced order (i.e., the number of sensors is lower than the number of the state variables the full model would require). The goal is to locate the sensors in such a way to minimize the deviations from the response of the true (full) model. One adopts either accelerometers as sensors or devices reading relative displacements. Two applications are studied: a plane frame is first investigated; the focus is eventually on a 3D body.

Monitoring a steel building using GPS sensors

Casciati, Fabio,Fuggini, Clemente Techno-Press 2011 Smart Structures and Systems, An International Jou Vol.7 No.5

To assess the performance of a structure requires the measurement of global and relative displacements at critical points across the structure. They should be obtained in real time and in all weather condition. A Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) could satisfy the last two requirements. The American Global Position System (GPS) provides long term acquisitions with sampling rates sufficient to track the displacement of long period structures. The accuracy is of the order of sub-centimetres. The steel building which hosts the authors' laboratory is the reference case-study within this paper. First a comparison of data collected by GPS sensor units with data recorded by tri-axial accelerometers is carried out when dynamic vibrations are induced in the structure by movements of the internal bridge-crane. The elaborations from the GPS position readings are then compared with the results obtained by a Finite Element (FE) numerical simulation. The purposes are: i) to realize a refinement of the structural parameters which characterize the building and ii) to outline a suitable way for processing GPS data toward structural monitoring.

Sensor placement driven by a model order reduction (MOR) reasoning

Casciati, Fabio,Faravelli, Lucia Techno-Press 2014 Smart Structures and Systems, An International Jou Vol.13 No.3

Given a body undergoing a stress-strain status as consequence of external excitations, sensors can be deployed on the accessible lateral surface of the body. The sensor readings are regarded as input of a numerical model of reduced order (i.e., the number of sensors is lower than the number of the state variables the full model would require). The goal is to locate the sensors in such a way to minimize the deviations from the response of the true (full) model. One adopts either accelerometers as sensors or devices reading relative displacements. Two applications are studied: a plane frame is first investigated; the focus is eventually on a 3D body.

Wireless links for global positioning system receivers

Fabio Casciati,Lijun Wu 국제구조공학회 2012 Smart Structures and Systems, An International Jou Vol.10 No.1

Given an object, its positioning in the space is a main concern in structural monitoring and a required feedback in structural health monitoring, structural control and robotics. In addition, to make the sensor unit wireless is a crucial issue for advanced applications. This paper deals with the exploitation of wireless transmission technology to long-term monitoring GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers - like the Leica GMX 902 and the Leica GRX 1200-pro. These GPS receivers consist of five parts: antenna, receiver,user client computer, interface and power supply. The antenna is mounted on the object to be monitored and is connected with the receiver by a coaxial-cable through which the radio frequency signals are transmitted. The receiver unit acquires, tracks and demodulates the satellite signals and provides, through an interface which in this paper is made wireless, the resulting GPS raw data to the user client computer for being further processed by a suitable positioning algorithm. The power supply reaches the computer by a wired link, while the other modules rely on batteries re-charged by power harvesting devices. Two wireless transmission systems, the 24XStream and the CC1110, are applied to replace the cable transmission between the receiver and the user client computer which up to now was the only market offer. To verify the performance and the reliability of this wireless transmission system, some experiments are conducted. The results show a successful cable replacement.

Variability in mechanical properties and microstructure characterization of CuAlBe shape memory alloys for vibration mitigation

Casciati, Fabio,van der Eijk, Casper Techno-Press 2008 Smart Structures and Systems, An International Jou Vol.4 No.2

Shape memory alloys (SMA) have been emphasized, studied and understood in the controlled world of the laboratory. Any attempt to implement one of these alloys in engineered products requires a jump from the controlled world of the laboratory to the actual environment of the application. The first step is to move from single grain specimens to multigrain samples. One works with a material for which any stock is different from that previously available. This paper reviews the milestones in the familiarization process the authors had to overcome during their cooperation within a project funded by the European Union. The main items cover transformation temperatures, thermal treatment and properties understanding.

Spatio-temporal protocol for power-efficient acquisition wireless sensors based SHM

Nikola Bogdanovic,Dimitris Ampeliotis,Kostas Berberidis,Fabio Casciati,Jorge Plata-Chaves 국제구조공학회 2014 Smart Structures and Systems, An International Jou Vol.14 No.1

In this work, we address the so-called sensor reachback problem for Wireless Sensor Networks, which consists in collecting the measurements acquired by a large number of sensor nodes into a sink node which has major computational and power capabilities. Focused on applications such as Structural Health Monitoring, we propose a cooperative communication protocol that exploits the spatio-temporal correlations of the sensor measurements in order to save energy when transmitting the information to the sink node in a non-stationary environment. In addition to cooperative communications, the protocol is based on two well-studied adaptive filtering techniques, Least Mean Squares and Recursive Least Squares, which trade off computational complexity and reduction in the number of transmissions to the sink node. Finally, experiments with real acceleration measurements, obtained from the Canton Tower in China, are included to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.