A wireless sensor with data-fusion algorithm for structural tilt measurement

Tilt is a key indicator of structural safety. Real-time monitoring of tilt responses helps to evaluate structural condition, enable cost-effective maintenance, and enhance lifetime resilience. This paper presents a prototype wireless sensing system for structural tilt measurement. Long range (LoRa) technology is adopted by the sensing system to offer long-range wireless communication with low power consumption. The sensor integrates a gyroscope and an accelerometer as the sensing module. Although tilt can be estimated from the gyroscope or the accelerometer measurements, these estimates suffer from either drift issue or high noise. To address this challenging issue and obtain more reliable tilt results, two sensor fusion algorithms, the complementary filter and the Kalman filter, are investigated to fully exploit the advantages of both gyroscope and accelerometer measurements. Numerical simulation is carried out to validate and compare the sensor fusion algorithms. Laboratory experiment is conducted on a simply supported beam under moving vehicle load to further investigate the performance of the proposed wireless tilt sensing system.