Energy and buildings

In recent years, many scholars have dedicated their research to the development of low-cost sensors for monitoring of various parameters. Despite their high number of applications, the state of the art related to low-cost sensors in building monitoring has not been addressed. To fill this gap, this article presents a systematic review, following well-established methodology, to analyze the state of the art in two aspects of structural and indoor parameters of buildings, in the SCOPUS database. This analysis allows to illustrate the potential uses of low-cost sensors in the building sector and addresses the scholars the preferred communication protocols and the most common microcontrollers for installation of low-cost monitoring systems. In addition, special attention is paid to describe different areas of the two mentioned fields of building monitoring and the most crucial parameters to be monitored in buildings. Finally, the deficiencies in line with limited number of studies carried out in various fields of building monitoring are overviewed and a series of parameters that ought to be studied in the future are proposed.

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-5309/11/8/336/pdf

Application of Low-Cost Sensors for Building Monitoring: A Systematic Literature Review

Nowadays, low-cost accelerometers are getting more attention from civil engineers to make Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications affordable and applicable to a broader range of structures. The present accelerometers based on Arduino or Raspberry Pi technologies in the literature share some of the following drawbacks: (1) high Noise Density (ND), (2) low sampling frequency, (3) not having the Internet’s timestamp with microsecond resolution, (4) not being used in experimental eigenfrequency analysis of a flexible and a less-flexible bridge, and (5) synchronization issues. To solve these problems, a new low-cost triaxial accelerometer based on Arduino technology is presented in this work (Low-cost Adaptable Reliable Accelerometer—LARA). Laboratory test results show that LARA has a ND of 51 µg/√Hz, and a frequency sampling speed of 333 Hz. In addition, LARA has been applied to the eigenfrequency analysis of a short-span footbridge and its results are compared with those of a high-precision commercial sensor.

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Low-Cost Wireless Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges

Today, low-cost sensors in various civil engineering sectors are gaining the attention of researchers due to their reduced production cost and their applicability to multiple nodes. Low-cost sensors also have the advantage of easily connecting to low-cost microcontrollers such as Arduino. A low-cost, reliable acquisition system based on Arduino technology can further reduce the price of data acquisition and monitoring, which can make long-term monitoring possible. This paper introduces a wireless Internet-based low-cost data acquisition system consisting of Raspberry Pi and several Arduinos as signal conditioners. This study investigates the beneficial impact of similar sensor combinations, aiming to improve the overall accuracy of several sensors with an unknown accuracy range. The paper then describes an experiment that gives valuable information about the standard deviation, distribution functions, and error level of various individual low-cost sensors under different environmental circumstances. Unfortunately, these data are usually missing and sometimes assumed in numerical studies targeting the development of structural system identification methods. A measuring device consisting of a total of 75 contactless ranging sensors connected to two microcontrollers (Arduinos) was designed to study the similar sensor combination theory and present the standard deviation and distribution functions. The 75 sensors include: 25 units of HC-SR04 (analog), 25 units of VL53L0X, and 25 units of VL53L1X (digital). 

/pdf/low-cost-sensors-accuracy-study-and-enhancement-strategy-1q8npduv.pdf

Low-Cost Sensors Accuracy Study and Enhancement Strategy

Owing to the high energy consumption in the building sector, appraising the thermal performance of building envelopes is an increasing concern. Recently, a few in situ methodologies to diagnose the thermal parameters of buildings have been considered. However, because of their limitations such as low accuracy, limited number of measurements, and the high cost of monitoring devices, researchers are seeking a new alternative. In this study, a novel hyper-efficient Arduino transmittance-meter was introduced to overcome these limitations and determine the thermal parameters of building envelopes. Unlike conventional methodologies, the proposed transmittance-meter is based on synchronized measurements of different parameters necessary to estimate the transmittance parameter. To verify the applicability of the transmittance-meter, an experimental study was conducted wherein a temperature-controlled box model was thermally monitored, and the outputs of the transmittance-meter employed were compared with those captured by a commercial device. The results revealed a high level of reduction in cost and a low range of difference compared with the latter, thereby validating the applicability of the proposed thermal monitoring system.

/pdf/a-novel-data-acquisition-system-for-obtaining-thermal-g31uyw0a.pdf

A Novel Data Acquisition System for Obtaining Thermal Parameters of Building Envelopes

Open source platforms for monitoring thermal parameters of structures

In structures with reduced monitoring budgets, the high cost of commercial metering devices is always an obstacle for monitoring structural health. This might be an issue when temperatures must be measured for both structural and environmental reasons. To fill this gap, in this paper, a novel monitoring system is proposed for the accurate measurement of indoor temperature in buildings. This protocol is characterized by its generality, as it can be easily adapted to measure any structural or environmental parameters on site. The proposed monitoring system uses from one to eight low-cost sensors to obtain multiple measurements of the ambient temperatures. The accuracy ranges of the developed monitoring systems with different numbers of sensors are statistically analysed. The results indicate that the discrepancy of the measurements decreases with the increase in the number of sensors, as the maximum standard deviation of 10 sensors (0.42) decreases to 0.32 and 0.27 for clusters of 20 and 30 sensors, respectively.

/pdf/application-of-low-cost-sensors-for-accurate-ambient-3hcy6g7f.pdf

Application of Low-Cost Sensors for Accurate Ambient Temperature Monitoring

The authors are indebted to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for the funding provided through the research projects BIA2013-47290-R, BIA2017-86811-C2-1-R, and BIA2017-86811-C2-2-R founded with FEDER funds It is also to be noted that funding for this research has been provided to Mr. BEHNAM MOBARAKI by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through its program for his Ph.D. It is also to be noted that part of this work was done through grant number 2018-COB-9092 from Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (UCLM).

/pdf/environmental-monitoring-system-based-on-low-cost-sensors-qbujll77bv.pdf

Francisco Javier Castilla Pascual

Papers

Application of Low-Cost Sensors for Building Monitoring: A Systematic Literature Review

A Novel Data Acquisition System for Obtaining Thermal Parameters of Building Envelopes

Open source platforms for monitoring thermal parameters of structures

Application of Low-Cost Sensors for Accurate Ambient Temperature Monitoring

Environmental monitoring system based on low-cost sensors