Significant technological advances in sensing and communication promote the use of large sensor networks to monitor structural systems, identify damages, and quantify damage levels. Prognostics and health management (PHM) technique has been developed and applied for a variety of safety-critical engineering structures, given the critical needs of the structure health state awareness. The PHM performance highly relies on real-time sensory signals which convey the structural health relevant information.

Distributed wireless architecture for prognostics is an important enabling step in prognostic research in order to achieve feasible real-time system health management. A significant problem encountered in implementation of such architectures is power management. In this paper, we present robust power management techniques for a generic health management architecture that involves diagnostics and prognostics for a system comprising multiple heterogeneous components.

The integration of structural health monitoring (SHM) systems into in-service applications has been hindered by the implied infrastructure, specifically wires for power and data from each sensor an acquisition and/or processing unit. Prior research by the present investigators has demonstrated a patented method of point-of-measurement datalogging for SHM, thereby greatly reducing the required quantity of cable by locally converting analog signals into digital data that can be placed on a common sensor-bus.