A Preliminary Qualification Approach for Structural Health Monitoring Systems

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is gaining increasing attention in Italy and worldwide due to structural obsolescence and sudden collapses occurring from time to time due to insufficient maintenance or extreme events. On the other hand, the technological progress in the SHM field is making it particularly attractive as a complement to visual inspections and in-situ surveys aimed at assessing the structural safety. Accordingly, several guidelines have been developed with the aim to provide useful recommendations to technician for the design of SHM systems. Nevertheless, because of very case-specific design, so far, a general qualification procedure aimed at assessing the performance of a SHM system is still missing. On the contrary, construction products already share a thorough and well-established harmonized standardization framework since many years, and this resulted in a reliable control of performance. In this study, a preliminary qualification approach for SHM systems is proposed. The qualification scheme is scenario dependent and allows to check the effectiveness of a given SHM system defined in terms of hardware as well as software components. In order to validate the approach, different SHM systems are hypothesized and checked for possible qualification with respect to different scenarios, obtaining encouraging results. The proposed approach, therefore, represents a promising attempt towards a more exhaustive and comprehensive qualification framework for civil SHM applications.