The Polytect European project, with SMARTEC as one of the partners, was featured in a 8 minuets video on Euronews recently.

The video can be watched here.

Here are some highlights:

Structural engineer for D’Appolonia SpA, Thomas B.Messervey said: “The idea is simply to make architectural structures more like the human body, and to build a skin for those structures. So by combining the information that we can obtain from sensors, we can build a relationship with the architectural structure overtime.

And we can ideally conduct what we call ‘;structural health modelling’ which hopes to answer four questions: Is the damage present? Where is that damage on the structure? How severe is that damage? And finally what does this damage mean? What is the life of the structure after this damage has occurred?”

And they are already well advanced with some prototypes.

Messervey went on: “There is a product for a masonry structure. The glass fibres go in many different directions, because the stresses and the loads in the architectural structure go also in many different directions. And inside we have sensors, fibre-optic cables in this case, that we can send light through to assess the health and the state of the structure. For geotechnical products, to protect against landslides, we will put these textiles underground in the earth. We can use filter-type products or we can use a grid-like material to both stregthen the soil or to filter water, and still be able to pass light and information throughout our sensors to interrogate whether or not the soil is moving.

[Euronews]