This research investigates a cyber-physical framework for scalable, long-term monitoring and maintenance of civil infrastructures. With growth of the world economy and its population, there has been an ever increasing dependency on larger and more complex networks of civil infrastructure as evident in the billions of dollars spent by the federal, state and local governments to either upgrade or repair transportation systems or utilities. Despite these large expenditures, the nation continues to suffer staggering consequences from infrastructural decay. Therefore, paramount to the concept of a smart city of the future is the concept of smart civil infrastructure that can self-monitor itself to predict any impending failures and in the cases of extreme events (e.g. earthquakes) identify portions that would require immediate repair, and prioritize areas for emergency response. A goal of this research project is to make significant progress towards this grand vision by investigating a framework of infrastructural Internet-of-Things (i-IoT) using a network of self-powered, embedded health monitoring sensors. The collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of this research would provide opportunities for unique outreach programs involving undergraduate and graduate students in technical areas, e.g., sensors, IoTs and structural health monitoring. The project would also provide avenues for disseminating the results of this research to stakeholders in the state governments and for translating the results of the research into field deployable prototypes.
This research addresses different elements of the proposed i-IoT framework by bringing together expertise from three universities in the area of self-powered sensors, energy scavenging processors, structural health monitoring and earthquake engineering. At the fundamental level, the project involves investigating self-powered sensors that will require zero maintenance and can continuously operate over the useful lifespan of the structure without experiencing any downtime. The challenge in this regard is that sensors need to occupy a small enough volume such that an array of these devices could be easily embedded and can provide accurate spatial resolution in structural imaging. This research is also investigates techniques that would enable real time wireless collection of data from an array of self-powered sensors embedded inside a structure, without taking the structure out-of-service. The methods to be explored involve combining the physics of energy scavenging, transduction, rectification and logic computation to improve the system's energy-efficiency and reduce the system latency. At the algorithmic level the project explores novel structural failure prediction and structural forensic algorithms based on historical data collected from self-powered sensors embedded at different spatial locations. This includes kernel algorithms that can exploit the data to quickly identify the most vulnerable part of a structure after a man-made or a natural crisis (for example an earthquake). Finally, the technology translation plan for this research is to validate the proposed i-IoT framework in real-world deployment, which includes buildings, multi-span bridges and highways.
