Monitoring the structural safety of the nation's bridges may get a boost from wireless and green technologies.
Engineers at University of Texas at Austin are trying to design small wireless sensors to monitor bridges.The university has been awarded a five-year, $3.4 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help develop the bridge monitoring systems. The work will be a collaboration between several different departments at UT, including civil, electrical and mechanical engineering.
The United States has about 600,000 highway bridges, 25% of which are rated as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
The engineers will work together to develop a network of low-power wireless sensors that can be placed on existing bridges. The sensors will continuously monitor existing bridges for fractures.
How will the sensors be powered? It's interesting to note that the sensors won't depend on electrical energy, rather they will use solar or wind energy.
"What we'll be doing is real-time monitoring of the bridge," said Sharon L. Wood, the principal investigator and the chair of the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, in a press release.
The engineers will also develop technology for bridges that are not yet built. These sensors will be placed inside of bridges.
During bridge inspections, the sensors can be read using a wireless connection. They will be able to detect signs of corrosion, a type of damage that is not evident during visual inspections of bridges.
Engineers from National Instruments and the university will build custom hardware and software for the wireless networks and energy harvesting, as they are not commercially available.
They also will experiment with a variety of wireless technologies to determine what works best. The concrete and steel components of a bridge can cause interference with wireless communications.
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