This paper presents the design, development and testing of a low-cost Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system based on MEMS (Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems) triaxial accelerometers. A new control system composed by a myRIO platform, managed by specific LabVIEW software, has been developed. The LabVIEW software also computes the frequency response functions for the subsequent modal analysis. The proposed SHM system was validated by comparing the data measured by this set-up with a conventional SHM system based on piezoelectric accelerometers. After carrying out some validation tests, a high correlation can be appreciated in the behavior of both systems, being possible to conclude that the proposed system is sufficiently accurate and sensitive for operative purposes, apart from being significantly more affordable than the traditional one.

One of the most popular options in the Structural Health Monitoring field is the tracking of the modal parameters, which are estimated through the frequency response functions of the structure, usually in the form of accelerances, which are computed as the ratio between the measured accelerations and the applied forces. This requires the use of devices capable of synchronously recording accelerations at several points of the structure at high sampling rates and the subsequent computational analysis using the recorded data. To this end, this work presents and validates a new scalable acquisition system based on multiple myRIO devices and digital MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical System) accelerometers, intended for modal analysis of large structures. A simple form of this system was presented by the authors in a previous work, showing that a single board with some accelerometers connected to it got to obtain high quality measurements in both time and frequency domains. Now, a larger system composed by several slave boards connected and synchronized to a master one is presented. Delays lower than 100 ns are found between the synchronised channels of the proposed system. For validation purposes, a case study is presented where the devices are deployed on a timber platform to estimate its modal properties, which are compared with the ones provided by a commercial system, based on analog accelerometers, to show that similar results are obtained at a significantly lower cost.

The present paper studies the performance of a tuned mass damper (TMD) installed in a 183 m tall chimney located at the edge of the wake shed by another chimney. Numerical and experimental results are available. For the simulations, wind action is considered by solving several 2D flow problems on a selected number of horizontal planes, in the transverse direction to the stacks. On such planes, Navier-Stokes equations are solved to estimate the fluid action at different positions of the chimneys and standard interpolation techniques are applied in the vertical direction. An Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) approach is used to consider the moving domain, and a fractional-step scheme is used to solve the fluid field. For the structural modelling, chimneys are meshed using 3D beam finite elements. The time integration procedure used for the structural dynamics is based on the standard second order Bossak method. For each period of time, the fluid problem is solved, the aeroelastic analysis is carried out and the geometry of the fluid mesh of each plane is updated according to the structural movements. With this procedure and model updating techniques, the response of the leeward chimney is evaluated for different scenarios, revealing an interesting dependence of the TMD performance on the wind speed and direction.