How Sensors Monitor Bridges to Keep Us Safe
Vital to our infrastructure, bridges require regular maintenance to ensure safety for the cars, trucks, rails, and people regularly traversing them. Many bridges are 50 years or older, with citizens travelling across structurally deficient bridges every day.
“Structural health monitoring of
bridges clarifies which repairs need to be prioritised,” says IEEE Senior Member
Clint Andrews. “The deferred maintenance backlog has become so severe that it
is easy to just throw up your hands and invest opportunistically in repairs,
but the proper way is to prioritize based on the timely status information.”
Technologists are utilizing sensors
and other smart technologies to monitor and protect our bridges and from
irreparable damage to the infrastructure or the people involved if a structure
collapsed.
While sensors are being used to detect
early warnings of a catastrophic structural failure, they are also gathering
important data about necessary structural repairs after a natural weather event
like an earthquake or hurricane.
“In terms of civil management, the
wireless sensors are commonly used to monitor and report the physical condition
of bridges, such as the slip-factor and humidity,” says IEEE Member Yidong Li.
“Estimating traffic on different road segments would provide very useful
information for further analysis and decisions that would be taken or generated
by the system.”
Gathering this type of data is also
helpful for city management, providing the public with real-time traffic
conditions.
To create smart cities or Next-Generation Cities that are tech, citizen, and eco-friendly,
solutions need to be super-efficient. Innovations like IoT and the use of sensor
technology for waste disposal are a few instances. According to IBEF, India will be the third-largest market for
construction by 2022.
Sensors are also used for emergency
rescue situations in remote areas. “If there’s an emergency condition on the
roadside and emergency services can’t be reached nearby due to a lot of
traffic, in this scenario, emergency vehicles can be triggered automatically
through the connection of nearby wireless sensors sharing location details of
the spot to those services,” explains IEEE Senior Member Aiyappan Pillai.
HOW DO SENSORS PROTECT BRIDGES?
A wireless sensor device, also known
as a wireless sensor node, has a sensing unit connected to a processing unit, a
communication unit and a power unit. The sensor will also have storage memory.
“The sensing unit may include one or
many sensors for data acquisition of any physical phenomena of interest, such
as temperature, humidity, strain and acceleration. There is also a signal
conditioning unit, which incorporates an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) unit
for converting the analog signals,” says Li. “The processing unit is the main
controller of the node. It is responsible for managing the wireless sensor node
operations, including sensing and wireless communication. It generally consists
of an on-board computer (i.e. a microcontroller unit) with processing and data
storage capabilities.”
“When we monitor bridges, we apply a
large number of sensor nodes to formulate a wireless sensors network (WSN) and
the sensors formulate data acquisition subsystems,” Li adds.
Therefore,
to support the smooth functioning of bridges, it is essential to have sensor
technologies and city management will only further help in providing a
personalized experience for the city's businesses and people.
No comments:
Post a Comment