Smart monitoring of historic structures by wireless sensors

This paper will give an overview about the activities of the collaborative project SMooHS, Smart Monitoring of Historic Structures, funded by the European Commission in the 7th Framework Program. The project brings together scientists and small enterprises from six countries (Tab. 1) aiming to establish competitive and simple to use monitoring methodologies based on wireless sensors to be applied to buildings and structures belonging to Cultural Heritage. The monitoring systems to be developed will be capable of taking advantage of the reduction of costs of wireless sensors. Such novel approach will deliver a “place-and-forget” SHM solution. Although the market offers a large number of different sensors their applicability for long-term monitoring of cultural heritage has not been validated in detail. In order to provide the practitioner in the field of cultural heritage with a tool which goes beyond the mere accumulation of data, but instead provides help in the sense of warnings and recommendations for action, procedures for data fusion and interpretation are implemented within the monitoring system. The proposed wireless system is intended to be user friendly, open source for maximum transparency, open for extensions and new modules, so to be adopted by practitioners in the field. Three main case studies from three different climate zones are included to be used to demonstrate and to validate the work that is done in the core Work Packages. In addition, two further test sites will serve for method and system enhancement. All are described in chapter 3 of this paper.