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Utilization of smartphone sensors for structural health monitoring

The ubiquitous nature of smartphones has created significant potential to form a low-cost wireless Citizen Sensor network and produce big data for monitoring structural integrity and safety under operational and extreme loads. This paper focuses on utilization of smartphone accelerometers for measuring structural vibration, from which structural health can be diagnosed as shown in many recent studies. Widely available smartphones are tested under sinusoidal wave excitations with frequencies in the range relevant to civil engineering structures, and their measurements are compared with those by high-quality reference sensors. Furthermore, large-scale seismic shaking table tests, observing input ground motion and response of a structural model, are carried out to evaluate the accuracy of smartphone accelerometers under operational, white-noise and earthquake excitations of different intensities. Finally, the smartphone accelerometers are tested on a dynamically loaded bridge. The extensive experiments show satisfactory agreements between the reference and smartphone sensor measurements in both time and frequency domains, demonstrating the capability of the smartphone sensors to measure structural responses ranging from low-amplitude ambient vibration to high-amplitude seismic response. Encouraged by the results of this study, the authors are developing a citizen-engaging and data-analytics crowdsourcing platform towards a smartphone-based Citizen Sensor network for structural health monitoring applications.

Author(s):

Ekin Ozer    
Columbia University
United States

Maria Feng    
Columbia University
United States