ABSTRACT

Smart civil structures with integrated structural health monitoring (SHM) and vibration control functions have been discussed in Chapters 14 and 15 in the frequency domain and the time domain, respectively. The power supply for operating sensory systems and vibration control devices in such an integrated system is supposed to be externally provided. Nevertheless, it is hoped that a smart civil structure will be partially or fully self-powered. Therefore, the possibility of energy harvesting (EH) to provide electric power to small batteries used in wireless sensor networks has recently been actively investigated so that SHM systems in civil structures may operate autonomously and sustainably without the periodical replacement of batteries. In this regard, a variety of EH technologies using five typical energy sources are first introduced in this chapter. A brief review of these EH techniques for the health monitoring of civil structures is then given, followed by an introduction to several interesting applications, which include an EH system using the wind-induced vibration of a stay cable to power a wireless sensory system (Kim et al. 2013), the long-term testing of a vibration-based EH system for the health monitoring of bridges (McCullagh et al. 2014) and a self-powered strain sensor for damage detection (Elvin et al. 2003). Overviews of vibration control systems integrated with EH systems are given in the final part of this chapter, where much attention is paid to the investigation carried out by Shen and Zhu (2015) and Shen et al. (2016) using electromagnetic (EM) dampers to reduce structural vibration on one hand and to generate electric power for wireless sensor networks on the other.