SHMLive Presentation

This video introduces SHMLive:

National Instruments intruduces SHM Kit

National Instruments has introduced an SHM system:

The NI Wi-Fi Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) System is based on NI Wi-Fi data acquisition (DAQ) devices, which combine IEEE 802.11 wireless or Ethernet communication, direct sensor connectivity, and the flexibility of NI LabVIEW software for remote monitoring of electrical, physical, mechanical, and acoustical signals. With built-in signal conditioning and the highest commercially available network security, NI Wi-Fi DAQ devices stream data in real time for easy-to-use, high-performance remote measurements.

The NI Wi-Fi SHM System features four accelerometer and four strain input channels; however, the system is expandable for additional measurements. The accelerometer channels offer software-selectable IEPE signal conditioning, 24-bit resolution, 102 dB dynamic range, 51.2 kS/s maximum simultaneous sampling, and antialiasing filters. The strain channels provide 24-bit resolution, 50 kS/s maximum simultaneous sampling, programmable half- and full-bridge completion, 1000 Vrms transient isolation, and transducer electronic data sheet (TEDS) smart sensor compatibility. The system also offers mixed-measurement capability for temperature, voltage, and other variables.

[National Instruments]

It appears to be a combination of wireless data acquisiton system, a few accellerometers and

Labview. So it is missing several key components for a true SHM system. It is probably aiming more the industrial sector and not the civil engineering Strucutral Health Monitoring segment that usually requires more sofisticated multi-sensor, multi-parameter solutions, along with data analysis and remote data trasmission.

New ISHMII Fellows

During the SHMII-4 conference in Zurich, six new ISHMII society fellows have been elected:

Prof. J. Brownjohn (first left)
Dr. S. Alampalli (second left)
Prof. Z. Wu (second right)
Dr. D. Inaudi (first right)
Prof. H. Koh
Prof. D. Frangopol

The awards were presented by the newly applinted ISHMII President, Prof. Farhad Ansari (in the center) and the SHMII-4 conference organizer, prof. Urs Maier.

Roctest launches SHMLive

Roctest launches SHMLive structural health monitoring solution to improve the safety of major public and private infrastructure. Real-time monitoring service will alert owners of structural risks and enable them to deploy resources where they are most needed.

Roctest Ltd (“Roctest”) (TSX: RTT), a leading designer and manufacturer of high-precision sensors for the civil engineering market, today announced the launch of SHMLive, a new and innovative web-based solution to monitor the health and status of infrastructure projects. Offered as a complete turnkey solution for a fixed monthly fee, SHMLive can save both up front capital costs and ongoing maintenance and repair costs for the owners of bridges, tunnels, high rise buildings and other infrastructure.

“SHMLive offers a choice that has not previously been available in the marketplace,” said François Cordeau, President and CEO, Roctest. “Traditionally, infrastructure owners have had to pay the full cost of a monitoring system at the outset, and then concern themselves with managing and interpreting the endless flow of data generated. With SHMLive, they can achieve superior monitoring capability and ease of adoption, with more predictable impact on their budgets."

SHMLive deployments will make use of the full range of available monitoring technologies. With more than 60 years of experience instrumenting complex structures worldwide, Roctest is the only company that can seamlessly integrate traditional vibrating wire instruments, fiber optic based sensors using five different technologies, concrete corrosion sensors, and any type of electrical sensors into a fully automated data acquisition system and integrated database while displaying the data in real-time anywhere in the world through its secure web site www.shmlive.com .

SHMLive Description

SHMLive deployments will begin with Roctest working with the infrastructure owner to identify specific objectives and design a customized monitoring system. Roctest will then install, operate and maintain the system providing a guaranteed service level. All data will be automatically transferred to Roctest’s secure online database where the data will be displayed in real-time on the SHMLive secure web site. With the support of selected local engineering partners, warning and alert limits can then be used to trigger the agreed upon protocol. All the instruments and sensors currently offered by Roctest and its subsidiaries integrate seamlessly in the SHMLive solution, as do third party traditional electrical sensors.

SHMLive Benefits

A 2008 U.S. Department of Transportation report found that 24% of the nearly 600,000 U.S. bridges were structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. This classification is based on visual inspection only and cannot fully capture hidden structural defects or capacity reserves. To monitor these assets becomes an enormous task for any organization if one only considers the amount of data generated by the monitoring sensors. SHMLive will behave the same way as a regular house security system, providing an alert whenever unusual behaviour is detected. Being an exceptionbased system, SHMLive does not require an army of engineers to continuously monitor the data, allowing smaller organizations with less resource to finally provide surveillance of critical structures. The same benefits will apply in Europe and Asia where aging infrastructures are a fact of life. Roctest is partnering with certified engineering firms worldwide to provide value-added services; however, the owner can also select its preferred engineering firm to analyze its data and recommend actions.

By understanding the static and dynamic behaviour of a structure, the owner can set priorities for maintenance and repairs, resulting in improved safety for its users and, in many cases, safely extending the life of the infrastructure with limited or no interventions. For large organizations like Departments of Transportation (D.O.T.) in the U.S. responsible for thousands of structures, the ability to assess and extend the useful remaining life of a structure will result in positive Return on Investment (R.O.I.) by prioritising rehabilitation efforts and optimizing the associated maintenance budget.

In the case of a high-rise building, SHMLive will provide instantaneous feedback on its health following an earthquake. For aging underground infrastructures like parking lots and tunnels, SHMLive will detect, in real-time, minuscule movements indicative of more serious issues. For geotechnical applications, SHMLive will provide a simple and cost-effective means of distributing measurements and alerts to all stakeholders involved in a construction project.

By offering this service based for a monthly fixed fee, Roctest provides infrastructure owners an affordable way to monitor these assets compared with the large capital expenditure that has historically been required, resulting in additional flexibility for owners to monitor more structures.

“Roctest will also continue to offer its complete portfolio of products in the same way we have for the last 60 years, targeting the large civil engineering projects and the continued surveillance of infrastructures by providing custom solutions using standard products. SHMLive will complement our offering by providing a value-added option to our customers who prefer a turnkey solution. The new service will be offered by all Roctest Group companies, including Roctest, Smartec and Telemac,” concluded Francois Cordeau.

For more information on SHMLive, please visit www.shmlive.com .

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]

World conference on structural control and monitoring

The world conference on structural control and monitoring will be held in Tokyo for the first time in 12 years. The second WCSC, which was held in Kyoto and Tokyo in 1998, is still remembered by many scientists and engineers as the milestone which motivated a lot of people to create a brave new world with this technology. The conference common interest was focused on active vibration control, passive energy dissipation devices, and sensor technologies at that time. Later on, structural health monitoring became the major application field where a wide variety of elemental technologies assembled and crystallized as a new engineering category. In the year 2010, Japan will host the conference again to revitalize the power of science and technology to open the second chapter in this field of engineering.

Details about this conference can be found at http://www.wcscm5.com/.

Abstracts are due Jan. 31, 2010

The Mega-Structure Diagnostic and Prognostic System developed by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has won the Special Prize and Gold Medal for its application in the Guangzhou New TV Tower at the 37th International Exhibition of Inventions, New Techniques and Products in Geneva in early April. This is yet another international recognition of PolyU's outstanding research achievements.

Being the landmark of the city, the Guangzhou New TV Tower will become the highest TV tower in the world with a total height of 610m, comprising a main tower of 454m and a 156m-high antenna. Designed with functions for sightseeing, TV transmission and cultural entertainment, the Tower comprises a Ferries wheel, observatory decks, ceremony hall, 4D cinemas, revolving restaurants, open-air skywalk, etc. To ensure safety during construction and operational performance during typhoons and earthquakes, an advanced monitoring system has been implemented for the first time in the supertall structure of the Tower by experts of the PolyU Department of Civil and Structural Engineering.

"The Mega-Structure Diagnostic and Prognostic System, making use of the fusion of technologies from different disciplines, such as sensing, communication, information technology, signal processing, data management, system identification, etc., provides structural monitoring, control, maintenance and management for mega-structures and performs a complete health monitoring throughout its life-cycle. The System does not only allow early identification of structural deterioration and damage for avoiding catastrophic structural failure, it also enables the assessment of structural safety immediately after unexpected disasters. The monitoring system can be applied to mega-structures like high-rise buildings and long-span bridges," said Dr. Yi-qing Ni, Principal Investigator of the monitoring system and Associate Professor of PolyU Department of Civil and Structural Engineering.

[PRLog]

SHM Articles

Here you can find an interesting collection of articles on SHM and NDT in general:

www.ndt.net

In particular, here is a list of articles on SHM.

Tobin Memorial Bridge Monitoring

In the next 18 months, the Massachusetts Port Authority’s (Massport) Tobin Memorial Bridge will be the state’s first bridge to have a wireless high-tech structural health monitoring system (SHM) in place to monitor stresses and strains in a real-time environment. In an effort to learn more about the behavior of the Tobin Bridge, Massport brought in an engineering consulting firm at a total project cost not to exceed $1 million. The firm will conduct structural modeling and analysis of forces and strains on the Tobin Bridge using a 3-D computer engineering model. Fay, Spofford & Thorndike (FST), located in Burlington, Mass., was chosen based on their overall qualifications and innovative approach. The firm’s knowledge base also is strengthened through an academic partnership with experts in the fields of structural engineering and computer analysis from Tufts University and the University of New Hampshire. A fourth member of the team, Geocomp of Boxborough, Mass., brings to the job worldwide expertise in placement and application of instrumentation. As a starting point, FST is working on the 3-D modeling, verification of results and recommendations for sensor and monitor placement on the Little Mystic truss and a six-span girder plate module on the Boston approach. These portions of the bridge were selected for their relatively simplified geometry in relation to the toll plaza and Big Mystic truss areas. A second phase for the Big Mystic truss also is under way. Further verification of the 3-D model results will be obtained by test loading of the Tobin Bridge once the sensors and monitors are installed. The test loading will consist of positioning fully loaded trucks along the bridge and recording the results. The test must be conducted when no other vehicle loading is on the portion of the span that is being tested. This will require that both decks of the Tobin Bridge be closed to traffic for a short period of time. The results of the test loading will help Massport engineers verify that the 3-D models are correctly predicting forces within the Tobin Bridge’s members and components. Once the verification process is complete, the models can then reliably be used to identify critical information points for sensor and monitor placement. These areas will include locations where elevated stress levels or unexpected deflections have been observed. At this writing, the initial 3-D models of the Tobin Bridge are still in development. Therefore, all key locations for sensor and monitor placement have not yet been finalized along with total project cost. [Roads and Bridges]

Dr. Bridge a new TV series on SHM

After the planetary success of Dr. House, another Princeton’s doctor is about to become the hero of a new TV series: Dr. Bridge.

BRIDGE, an innovative take on the structural drama, solves mysteries where the villain is a ill bridge and the hero is an irreverent, controversial doctor who trusts no one, least of all his patients.

Details on the new TV series can be found here.