To be more specific, Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology is looking to prevent bridge collapses within the construction industry using sensor technology. To solve the aging infrastructure dilemma facing the country, Raid Karoumi, a professor under the Institute’s division of Structural Engineering and Bridges, is looking to capture and detect infrastructural abnormalities at the earliest stage possible to extend the longevity of said buildings.
By applying sensor technology to deteriorating infrastructure, Karoumi is hoping to deliver as much as 400 pieces of real-time information per second to construction engineers charged with health monitoring. With the technology, engineers will not only be able to see information about bridges that could potentially prolong lifespan for another 10 years, but they can also detect cracks via the sensors invisible to the naked eye.
By utilizing the sensor technology, KTH and Karoumi say they are looking to add value and knowledge to the construction industry by easily allowing engineers to determine when and where inspections are required. Typically, inspections happen on educated guesswork of the lifespan of a building. And although inspectors and engineers will still very much be part of the solution to aging infrastructure and inspecting for damage, Karoumi says the sensor tech will save time and money by providing the industry with information that reports on exactly when inspections need to be done.
Karoumi points out, “It is costly to block traffic so it is good if the inspections are made [only] when necessary.” In addition to providing engineers with valuable information relevant to inspection, the sensors will also be able to relate what needs to be done post-inspection to mitigate as much risk as possible.
For instance, the KTH campus bridge connecting Stockholm and Lidingo was initially intended to be replaced in 2020. However, with the aid of the sensors, the bridge may be allowed to stand for an extra ten years thanks to the technology’s insightful analytics and information that could not be determined by a person alone.
While Karoumi is insistent that the Institute’s development for the construction industry is not meant as a substitute for visual inspections, he is adamant about the advantages sensor tech can provide the industry with, such as how bridges are impacted by traffic, wind, temperature, and fluctuations over the years. And it isn’t just old bridges that can benefit from the tech.
A bridge erected in 2005 connecting Sweden and Norway was fitted with 72 sensors upon completion. The Institute has thus far seen ten years’ worth of data that enables them to provide proactive support and maintenance for the bridge, extending its life far beyond what it would have been without the technology.
According to Karoumi,
“For newly constructed bridges, we want to check how they behave. You want to confirm that the calculation models used for dimensioning are correct. We dimension our bridges for 120 years of life and we want to use the measurements as a kind of footprint that we can compare them with later.”
The sensors themselves are operated by cables or batteries where wireless sensors can be recharged with the energy generated by the oscillations when the bridge vibrates.
Creating such a smart piece of infrastructure also lead Karoumi down an interesting path in the Autumn of 2014, when he attempted to connect bridges to the Internet, known by its catchier moniker, the blogging bridge. Although the idea failed after authorities deemed the ability of a bridge that could blog or tweet as a security risk, Karoumi did outfit the Astra bridge in Stockholm with wireless sensors capable of sending information 50 times per second to a cloud-based Internet service. There, it could report on things like how often the bridge oscillated when trains passed over. The results mined from Karoumi’s experiment were presented in one app available to the public.
Karoumi says that while the ability for a bridge to tweet to managers about the state of its own health is possible, everyone else is not quite there yet. But despite not being able to get Twitter updates from infrastructure, the capabilities being offered to the construction industry via sensor technology is a huge leap forward for the preservation and maintenance of bridges. And while Karoumi himself has said there is still much work to be done in regards to sensor tech and infrastructure, the end goal will always stay the same: to extend the life of bridges everywhere.
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