ABSTRACT
Increased awareness of the economic and social effects of aging, deterioration and
extreme events on civil infrastructure has been accompanied by recognition of the need for
advanced structural health monitoring and damage detection tools. A number of new
research projects have been funded to improve the damage detection methods including the
use of innovative signal processing, new sensors, and control theory. Moreover, due to the
dynamic nature of structures and their environment, creating and implementing the perfect
sensors and their corresponding systems is quite difficult. This pursuit has been quite
challenging for a multitude of reasons, which will be examined in this paper along with
different types of sensors and preferences.