The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be in the railroad, civil infrastructure, and engineering services industries, by providing engineering firms and infrastructure owners the means to enhance public safety while significantly reducing the costs of bridge infrastructure monitoring and revenue losses due to infrastructure downtime due to sudden events. Thousands of sudden events, such as vehicle impacts and overweight vehicle crossings, occur annually on the over 700,000 bridges in the U.S. Many go unnoticed or unreported, despite their potential to induce structural failures or hidden damage that significantly reduces the structure's service life. This project will provide a cost-effective wireless solution to detect, quantify, and report sudden events on civil infrastructure in near real-time. The proposed solution will replace three existing types of monitoring systems with one compact, easy-to-deploy device at a fraction of the cost of even a single legacy system. The rapid condition assessment capability will further reduce traffic disruption, thereby lowering daily economic losses that can range in the millions of dollars and offering the potential to make the nation's transportation infrastructure safer.
The proposed project seeks to develop a smart IoT monitoring system for rapid condition assessment of civil infrastructure under sudden events. Wired systems are prohibitively expensive for most structures, particularly bridges in remote locations, and existing wireless solutions following a duty-cycle approach to reduce power draw are incapable of always-on monitoring needed for sudden event detection. The objective of the research is to develop a low-cost IoT system to maintain always-on monitoring, so as not to miss an event, under a minimal power budget, without sacrificing data fidelity, and with a very low false positive rate. To this end, an asynchronously-triggered, synchronized data acquisition method will be developed, using high-fidelity wireless sensors that are tightly coupled with a programmable event-based switch capable of always-on operation. This method would enable the system to maintain ultralow-power operation indefinitely, and upon event detection, to rapidly transition to high-fidelity measurement. Uniquely, the pre- and post-event data are processed and stitched together across multiple sensors without the need for a priori synchronization. Experiments will be conducted to demonstrate the system?s capabilities to capture the onset of sudden events and present structural damage assessment in near real-time.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
