Discipline: Technology and Engineering
Subcategory: Electrical Engineering
Dilnesa Nukuro - University of the District of Columbia
Co-Author(s): Tam Le and Sasan Haghani, University of District of Columbia, Washington, DC
Asphalt pavements are expensive investments and state highway agencies spend millions of dollars every year to monitor the condition of pavements. The surface conditions of pavements, including the occurrence and severity of cracking, rutting, wear, deflection and other distresses present on pavement surface, are an important indicator of pavement performance. Traditional pavement health monitoring systems suffer from high cost and low durability due to the use of wires. While wired systems are quite expensive, the rapid development and miniaturization of sensor devices and the recent advances in wireless communication systems has enabled the continuous monitoring of various environmental conditions using wireless sensor networks. This project provides the detailed study and implementation of a wireless sensor network for real-time and continuous monitoring of concrete pavements. Two environmental conditions, namely temperature and humidity of concrete pavements are continuously monitored through a wireless sensor network. The sensor nodes consist of an SHT71 sensor, an Adruino Microcontroller and two ZigBee transmitters. The base stations consist of a ZigBee receiver that can collect data from the various sensors and submit to a sink base station where data can be stored and displayed using a graphical user interface. The sensor network was implemented and tested successfully where temperature and humidity data were collected from the sensors, were successfully transmitted to the base station and displayed using a graphical user interface developed using MATLAB.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): This research was supported by the UDC STEM Center for Research and Development NSF/HRD1531014 and by NSF/HRD1435947.
Faculty Advisor: Sasan Haghani, shaghani@udc.edu
Role: I was inviolved in the design and implementation of the project together with my classmate Tam Le, the co-author. I also prepared the abstract.