Sensing Methodologies and Sensor Networks for Health Monitoring of Civil Infrastructures 2013

All load-carrying civil infrastructures, such as long-span bridges, high-rise buildings, or large-scale offshore platforms, continuously accumulate damage during their long-term service life [1]. Any deformation or damage in a structure may affect the structural integrity, durability, and reliability. Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems that report in real time the structural condition in terms of stresses, strains, accelerations, and displacements, and so forth are central to meet the demanding goals of increasing structural safety and reliability, while reducing structure operating and maintenance costs. In general, a typical SHM system includes four major components: sensor subsystem, data acquisition and transmission subsystem, data storage subsystem, and condition evaluation subsystem [2]. Among them, the sensor subsystem is the first and most important one since the performance of whole SHM system is strongly dependent on available sensor measurements. It implies two critical constraints existing in such sensor subsystem applications: the suitable sensors available for the network and the optimal sensor placement (OSP) strategies working to maximize the ability to detect and discriminate relevant data features. It is, therefore, of increasing interest to seek ideal sensing methodologies and design methods of sensor networks. Recently, the advances of bioinspired, nanobased, piezoelectric, fiber optic, wireless and remote sensing technologies bring a new dimension to smart sensors. And, at the same time, with the rapid development in the sensor network design approach, such as the effective independence (EfI), modal kinetic energy (MKE), and SVD-based methods, the use of large-scale but economical and efficiency sensor networks for the SHM has become possible [3].

Over the last decade, the development in this most rapidly increasing research field has been periodically summarized and reviewed by many colleagues, focusing on one topic or another regarding specific technical aspects. Given the significant amount of work involved globally and the unique elongated feature of the sensing methodologies and sensor networks for the SHM and their applications, with an emphasis on civil engineering, it is important to have a platform that allows active researchers to present their new development in a timely and efficient manner. With this intention in mind, the first special issue “Sensing Methodologies and Sensor Networks for Health Monitoring of Civil Infrastructures,” containing 26 peer-reviewed papers, was published in 2012 in the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks and was obviously a great success. Based on the sensational effect of the 2012's special issue, this topic is elected officially as one of the annual special issues. This simply means that it has become a series of special issues which will be published each year. The guest editors are pleased with this decision since such a series will have a long-term impact and in time gather a civil SHM community around it in much the same way a successful annual conference or a conference session does without a doubt.

A total of 33 papers are presented in the current issue. Comparing with the first special issue, it can be found as the flourishing and diverse research activities in this area. The guest editors deeply believe that this issue will attract the special interest to the scientists and engineers in the field of civil engineering.