Jan 12 2009
On January 6, 2009, NIST announced that it created nine awards under its newly formed Technology Innovation Program (TIP), for developing the next generation of structural health monitoring systems for large infrastructure elements. Distributed Sensor Technologies, Inc. (DST), of Santa Clara, Calif., has been selected as a recipient for a program entitled "Fiber Sensing System for Civil Infrastructure Health Monitoring." DST and joint venture partners Optiphase, Inc., (Van Nuys, Calif.), Redfern Integrated Optics, Inc. (RIO), (Santa Clara, Calif.) and the University of Illinois at Chicago plan an innovative monitoring system for large public structures such as bridges, waterways or pipelines. This system substitutes a single optical fiber sensing cable for hundreds of discrete, local strain or fracture sensors.
Details of the NIST TIP announcement for the Infrastructure award can be found at: http://tipex.nist.gov/tippb/prjbriefs/prjbrief.cfm?ProjectNumber=080019
The funded program will enable the development of an economic method to instrument large structures for real-time, high-resolution monitoring of the public works infrastructure system for detection of cracks, large deformations, dynamic overloads and other critical structural conditions. By replacing local discrete sensors with lengths of optical fiber, the system will mitigate initial deployment costs of the discrete sensors and a variety of bandwidth and transmission problems associated with collecting data from a large number of sensors, while offering more precise information on the location and severity of faults.
The problem regarding the nation's infrastructure has recently yielded shocking statistics, such as the 2007 Federal Highway Administration study that rated more than twenty-five percent of U.S. bridges as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. DST is focused on large, national infrastructure projects to address such deficiencies with solutions to monitor these complex systems, which include over one million miles of water mains, 600,000 bridges and 4 million miles of public roadway.
Technology development from the DST joint venture partners includes high-performance laser sources from RIO, precision detection instrumentation from Optiphase, and civil structural monitoring expertise from the Department of Civil and Materials Engineering of the University of Illinois at Chicago.