Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 11
Bio-inspired Sensors for Structural Health
Monitoring
Kenneth J. Loh, Donghyeon Ryu and Bo Mi Lee
Abstract Structural systems are susceptible to damage throughout their opera-
tional lifetime. Thus, structural health monitoring technologies and, in particular,
sensors that could monitor structural performance and detect damage are needed.
While there exist a variety of different sensing platforms, this continues to be an
active area of research due to the many challenges associated with identifying and
quantifying structural damage, which is inherently very complex. This chapter
discusses an emerging area of sensors research in which sensor design or func-
tionality is inspired by biological systems. By borrowing concepts from and
learning how nature's creations sense and interact with its environment, the goal is
to create novel sensors with unparalleled performance as compared to the current
state-of-art. This chapter is not meant to be an exhaustive literature review on this
topic. Rather, only a small selection of published work is sampled and presented
to showcase different ideas and the breadth of research. Topics ranging from bio-
inspired algorithms, creature-like robots, and skin-like sensors are presented.
11.1 Introduction
Infrastructure systems, such as bridges, buildings, cranes, dams, and pipelines,
among others, could incur damage throughout their service lifetime. Natural
disasters, excessive loads, accidents, and/or environmental degradation could
cause various types of damage. Damage (e.g., corrosion or fatigue cracks) could
escalate over different time- and length-scales and while the structure remains in
service. If left undetected, accumulated damage could diminish structural perfor-
mance, serviceability, and safety.
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