Low power SHM via frequency-steerable acoustic transducers and compressive sensing

The weight penalty and maintenance concerns associated with wiring large number of transducers have to be addressed for widespread field deployment of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems. Wireless sensors can simplify such deployment. However, a major limitation of wireless ultrasound sensing technology is the incompatibility between the high frequency of the ultrasound signals and the limited data throughput of existing wireless transponders. In this work, a novel transduction concept based on shaped sensors is combined with an innovative acquisition scheme to fulfill two main objectives: 1) to reduce the number of sensing elements; 2) to lower the data throughput with compressive acquisitions.