Structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies have developed quickly in the last two decades in an effort to achieve structural and operational safety of civil infrastructure. However, many challenges must be addressed to realize practical and effective SHM applications. One of the challenges is the lack of technologies and methods to detect structural displacements accurately, efficiently and affordably. The drawbacks of conventional displacement measurement technologies limit their implementation.

This dissertation presents a promising technology, Continuous Wave (CW) radar, which originated as a sensor for vital sign and tumor detection, to measure displacement accurately and inexpensively. The goal of this project is to develop and validate a new type of CW radar which is suitable for structural displacement measurement applications within a low-cost wireless sensor network.

This dissertation presents the limitations of conventional displacement measurement technologies and introduces the theory and operation of the CW radar as a proposed alternative for SHM. The merits of implementing SHM with wireless smart sensors are discussed and the "WiseMote" platform is introduced. The smart radar sensor developed in this research is the result of integrating the WiseMote with the CW radar. The enabling hardware and software required to achieve this smart radar are presented. The performance of the CW radar sensor is characterized in laboratory experiments and the performance of radar sensor for the field test has also been validated by a series of full-scale bridge tests. Finally discussion and future work related to smart radar sensor's application are summarized.