Unpowered resonant wireless sensor nets for structural health monitoring

The primary objective of this work is the development of low-cost, wireless, unpowered, resonant sensor nets that can be used to monitor large areas in civil infrastructure systems. A critical new area of research relates to the coupling of individual sensors into a net to produce collective, crystal-like behavior, allowing large area coverage with high sensitivity to damage. We are investigating such collective phenomena in arrays of passive resonant sensors. The goal is to provide information about corrosion (or some other ldquotargetrdquo) anywhere within the sensor array. An electronic structural surveillance (ESS) net is formed from an array of inductively coupled, resonant sensors, such as those developed in our previous work. Here we present results showing the collective behavior of such a system that should lead to both larger areal coverage and more sensitive detection of small defects.