Radio Frequency Identification Sensing Techniques and Systems for Structural Health Monitoring: A Review of the State of the Art

The structural damages of metallic structure components in many critical facilities and equipment may result in disasters that endanger human life. Existing Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) solutions commonly suffer from the limitations of bulky equipment, poor environmental adaptability, and high costs, which raise challenges for detection efficiency and large-scale multi-target monitoring. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensing technology, featuring Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS), flexible and pasteable, and easy deployment, show great promise for SHM. Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of RFID sensors for structural damage sensing including cracks, strain, and corrosion of metal structures, along with the analysis of parameters like crack width, structural deformation, and corrosion depth. This study provides a survey and in-depth analysis of recent technical progress in RFID sensor-based SHM. The main contributions include: (1) Classification of the novel sensing techniques and systems based on the functional model of RFID backscatter sensing; (2) Summarization of the common structural damage types and the feature extraction techniques of RFID sensing for SHM; (3) Survey of the recent progresses of the techniques, methods, and applications for RFID-based SHM; (4) Analysis of the challenges facing the state-of-the-art, including characterization and quantification of structure damage parameters and the impact of environmental factors, followed with an outlook of the future work. This study provides a timely reference for the innovation and practice of RFID sensing techniques in the field of SHM.