A Wireless Sensor Network based Structural Health Monitoring system for an airplane

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a mechanism that is used to determine the origin of any damage in a particular structure and to evaluate the health of civil structures and buildings. In traditional SHM systems, usually, sensors are embedded into a structure and any information sensed from the vibrations of the structure is sent via wires to a central data repository. Such systems suffer from drawbacks like expensive installation and maintenance, unreliable communication in wires etc. Wires in modern SHM systems are being replaced by Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) that alleviate many disadvantages in traditional wired SHM systems. In this paper, a WSN based SHM system is designed for an airplane with sensors placed at certain optimum locations inside it. The WSN based SHM model for airplane is tested for its performance using OPNET and it is found that the proposed model functions efficiently in a simulated environment.