A New Structural Health Monitoring Approach Based on Smartphone Measurements of Magnetic Field Intensity
Ali Matin Nazar, Pengcheng Jiao, Qianyun Zhang, King-James Idala Egbe, Amir H. Alavi
Abstract
In this paper, a new structural damage detection approach is proposed, based on monitoring of the magnetic field intensity variations using smartphones. Experimental and numerical studies are conducted on steel plates to verify the efficiency of the proposed approach. Various damage scenarios are introduced to the steel plates. Then, a smartphone magnetometer sensor is deployed to measure the changes of the magnetic flux due to damage progression. The experimental and numerical results agree well with each other. Based on the results, the magnetic field intensity increases as the damage progresses. Furthermore, the damage detection accuracy declines as the distance of the smartphone increases from the steel plate surface. The proposed method can be considered as a promising, cost-effective and crowdsourcing sensing platform empowered by citizens for structural health monitoring of civil infrastructure systems.