Structural Health Monitoring Test System

The Challenge:

A Melbourne-based university had a new engineering being built on campus, and the civil engineering department commissioned a structural health monitoring system to be distributed around the new building. They required 250+ strain/vibration/voltage/temperature sensors to be placed in various locations across multiple levels and areas. The data collected needed to be tightly synchronised, and made available to students for class assignments, etc.

The Solution:

Wired-in Software delivered a NI cRIO based platform, which included eight TSN-enabled cRIOs, with a range of strain/vibration/general purpose modules. Wired-in deployed our generic real time monitoring template onto each cRIO, and set them up to log data from all sensors at 512 Hz. Each cRIO had a 1TB SSD connected to it to store the data locally. A central Windows LabVIEW application ran on a virtual machine inside the university infrastructure to accumulate all data using the WebDAV protocol and store onto a university data server. The picture shown below shows data captured from the system in Sep 2021, when the Melbourne earthquake occurred.