This project is creating an upper-level undergraduate laboratory emphasizing real-time, non-destructive, field data-acquisition and interpretation for civil and environmental engineering (C&EE). The campus serves as the laboratory bench. Student teams place sensors (e.g. strain, pressure, conductivity, flow) on chosen features such as a bridges, wells, storm drains and retaining walls. Teams then interface that equipment with computer data-acquisition systems, calibrate and maintain the data, and monitor responses to changing environmental conditions. Thus, structural behavior under load, traffic flow and intensity, air pollution loading, stormwater and groundwater flow, and quality is recorded, analyzed and displayed using GIS and visualization tools. This educational thrust builds practical experience in the infrastructure while addressing traditional weaknesses in many C&EE curricula. Students encounter large, practical data sets in a radical departure from conventional pedagogy. By fostering interdisciplinary work using tools and techniques from traditional electrical, systems, and chemical engineering fields, C&EE students are trained to manage information flows in "noisy" environments and to use those flows in flexible operational strategies. Restructuring of the curriculum stressing interactive learning along with a blurring of traditional disciplinary boundaries makes this innovative course timely. By serving as a practical "capstone," with an emphasis on problem definition as well as resolution, this lab prepares C&EE students for the expanded demands of the workplace and its focus on the collection and management of information.
