Roman Pawel Klis

Research

Implementation of Wireless Sensor Network for Monitoring of Large Civil Structures
A large part of civil infrastructure is currently approaching the end of its design lifetime. As a result, the associated maintenance and inspection costs are bound to increase. In an effort to reduce these costs and to properly monitor infrastructure, it is reasonable to develop monitoring systems that can alert and trigger remedial action where it is indeed needed. For the successful operation of such a “smart” system, toward a sustainable infrastructure, reliable sensor arrays are required as the enabling tool. Wireless sensor networks technology (WSN) form a promising candidate for enabling the deployment of dense and relatively cheap sensor arrays. Unfortunately, the long term applicability of currently available WSN systems is limited due to the lack of a power supply solution capable of supporting the sensing node for a long period of time. This project addresses this issue by combining the recently surfaced energy harvesting methods with the up-to-date data compression methods in order to create a self-sustainable wireless sensing node working in a minimal-maintenance fashion. The aim of the project is to create a reliable wireless sensor node cluster for structural monitoring together with suitable data acquisition software such that the operational power consumption is minimal.