Maintaining and repairing critical infrastructure is becoming ever more expensive, and there is increasing international focus on monitoring the condition of infrastructure. A new project is bringing together seven major Danish organisations to develop intelligent, battery-less and wireless monitoring that can increase the security and service life of large infrastructure projects.

Constant monitoring of corrosion and rust formation within large concrete structures using a wireless sensor network that supplies its own energy without batteries. Monitoring, that can detect and predict possible problems using artificial intelligence. That is the purpose of the CorroSense research project, which has received DKK 26 million (EUR 3.5 million) in funding from Innovation Fund Denmark.

The main goal of this project is to research and develop a low-power reliable wireless (corrosion) sensor network (WSN) enabling continuous health monitoring of reinforced concrete structures, allowing for early detection and prediction of corrosion through sensor fusion of the collected data from corrosion, temperature, humidity, etc. A low cost WSN will eliminate the need for intensive manual labor-work and will allow for continuous measurements if needed. For distributed WSNs over a large area, a concerning issue is how to power such devices. This project, CorroSense, therefore  aims to bring smartness to reinforced concrete as well as to eliminate batteries, an environmentally friendly and green goal as it would eliminate millions of electrochemical batteries. Furthermore by miniaturization, it will be possible to retrofit the sensors into existing structures.