Wireless strain and temperature monitoring in reinforced concrete using Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) sensors

Monitoring the health of civil engineering structures using implanted deformation, temperature and corrosion sensors would further improve maintenance and extend the service life of those structures. However, sensor integration poses a number of problems, due to the presence of cables and on-board electronics. Passive, wireless SAW sensors offer a very promising solution, here. We used commercial SAW devices mounted on steel rebars to carry out an initial feasibility study. Without cables or embedded electronics, we were able to measure the deformation of a concrete beam subjected to bending load. We were also able to measure the temperature continuously over a three-week period.

Energy Management in Storage-Augmented, Grid-Connected Prosumer Buildings and Neighbourhoods Using a Modified Simulated Annealing Optimization

This article introduces a modified simulated annealing optimization approach for automatically determining optimal energy management strategies in grid-connected, storage-augmented, photovoltaics-supplied prosumer buildings and neighbourhoods based on user-specific goals. For evaluating the modified simulated annealing optimizer, a number of test scenarios in the field of energy self-consumption maximization are defined and results are compared to a gradient descent and a total state space search approach. The benchmarking against these two reference methods demonstrates that the modified simulated annealing approach is able to find significantly better solutions than the gradient descent algorithm - being equal or very close to the global optimum - with significantly less computational effort and processing time than the total state space search approach.