Roadways and bridges play an important role in the economic and social health of society by connecting commerce and people. Economic growth and population expansion pose considerable burden on the aging infrastructure (i.e., pavements and bridges). There is a pressing need to develop structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies capable of collecting infrastructure utilization data. Doing so inexpensively with self-powered systems will revolutionize infrastructure monitoring technology, and will improve decision making enabling roadway and bridge preservation. In this study, a self-powered battery-less structural health monitoring (SHM) system was developed. It is powered by a thermal energy harvester equipped with thermoelectric generators (TEGs) driven by temperature differentials between the top of asphalt pavements and their lower layers. An innovative 2-tier TEG harvester was designed to limit the downtime of the SHM system when the temperature differentials are insufficient to power a single unit. The 2-tier system requires a minimum of 2.1⁰C in temperature differential to generate the minimum of 40 mV needed to power the SHM system. The SHM system consists of a DC-DC booster to increase the voltage generated by the harvester, a buck controller to bring this voltage down to the 3.3 Volts required for powering the microcontroller, a microcontroller and a wireless transceiver for transmitting the data. Another transceiver carried on-board a pilot vehicle is needed to retrieve the data. Software was developed in this project to allow data communication between the two transceivers. The SHM system developed accepts analogue voltage input from any sensor that generates analogue voltage, (e.g., piezoelectric axle load sensors, strain gauges, temperature gauges and so on). A prototype of this SHM system was constructed and tested in the lab and it is ready for field implementation.

Tran-SET Project No. 17PTAM03