Energy analysis of industrial sensors in novel wireless SHM systems

A novel, multi-vendor, multi-sensor interface, capable of integrating a range of state-of-the-art sensors, applicable to the structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil infrastructures, with ultra-low power wireless communications hardware, is considered. This paper focuses on a fine-grained analysis of the energy requirements for integrating these industrial sensors; illustrating the first order effects on overall energy utilisation observed, primarily due to the relatively high warm-up periods required by the sensors. Such analysis is of significant importance with respect to generating realistic models of the sensing system for evaluation and simulation prior to deployment. It is shown that, taking an illustrative example of the displacement transducer, a sample operation inclusive of a 500ms warm-up period corresponds to 14 times more power than a transmission operation. Furthermore, the relationship is shown to be linear - with some selected sensors requiring warm-up periods in the order of seconds.