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Bio-inspired Sensors for Structural Health Monitoring

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Biotechnologies and Biomimetics for Civil Engineering

Abstract

Structural systems are susceptible to damage throughout their operational lifetime. Thus, structural health monitoring technologies and, in particular, sensors that could monitor structural performance and detect damage are needed. While there exist a variety of different sensing platforms, this continues to be an active area of research due to the many challenges associated with identifying and quantifying structural damage, which is inherently very complex. This chapter discusses an emerging area of sensors research in which sensor design or functionality is inspired by biological systems. By borrowing concepts from and learning how nature’s creations sense and interact with its environment, the goal is to create novel sensors with unparalleled performance as compared to the current state-of-art. This chapter is not meant to be an exhaustive literature review on this topic. Rather, only a small selection of published work is sampled and presented to showcase different ideas and the breadth of research. Topics ranging from bio-inspired algorithms, creature-like robots, and skin-like sensors are presented.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Kenneth J. Loh, Donghyeon Ryu & Bo Mi Lee

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  1. Kenneth J. Loh
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  2. Donghyeon Ryu
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Correspondence to Kenneth J. Loh .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. C-TAC Research Unit, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal

    Fernando Pacheco Torgal

  2. CICECO University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    J. A. Labrincha

  3. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    M. V. Diamanti

  4. Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Urban Environment, Xiamen, China

    C.-P. Yu

  5. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    H. K. Lee

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Loh, K.J., Ryu, D., Lee, B.M. (2015). Bio-inspired Sensors for Structural Health Monitoring. In: Pacheco Torgal, F., Labrincha, J., Diamanti, M., Yu, CP., Lee, H. (eds) Biotechnologies and Biomimetics for Civil Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09287-4_11

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