Design principles and challenges for an autonomous WSN for structural health monitoring in aircrafts

Structural health monitoring is a critical part of the maintenance procedures of an aircraft. Most of the problems that arise from structural elements are detected by trained personnel using visual inspection. Moreover, the places at which these structural elements are located are frequently very difficult to access. This makes inspections time consuming and potentially very costly. In this paper we are presenting the design principles that must be taken into account in order to successfully deploy a wireless sensor network in an aircraft. We will discuss the relations between sampling duration, power consumption, energy harvesting and storage, wireless communication and network architecture in order to successfully deploy the system. In order to consider the trade-offs between different design issues we have designed a sensor node equipped with an accelerometer, a temperature and humidity sensor and a strain gauge sensor. The sensor node has an energy harvester from a thermo-electrical generator and a battery storage element. Wireless communications are based on Zigbee protocol and the sensor node is controlled from a low power microcontroller.