Wireless sensor networks for continuous structural health monitoring of historic masonry towers

The recent developments of micro-electro-mechanical systems and wireless sensor networks allow today the use of low-cost and small-size sensors for continuous monitoring of civil structures. Both these features are very important for the low impact of the sensor grid in heritage structures, ensuring a low-cost and sustainable dynamic monitoring system. Over the last 20 years the use of sensor networks for continuous monitoring has received a growing interest. Anyway, still numerous questions remain opened about the sensitivity of measurement devices, the optimization of number and positioning of sensors, the energy efficiency of the network, and the development of algorithms for real-time data analysis. This paper, based on the aforementioned motivations, discusses about a monitoring system made of micro-electro-mechanical sensors connected through a wireless network. The architecture of the wireless sensor network and the automatized procedure proposed for the continuous processing of the recorded signals are discussed and described with reference to an explicative masonry tower case study. It is believed that the proposed technologies can provide an economical and relatively non-invasive tool for real-time structural monitoring and that, moreover, the availability of large amounts of data from actual measurements can give effective information on the structural behaviour of historic constructions.