 Faculty from EECS are working as part
of an interdisciplinary University of Michigan College of Engineering team
to develop smart bridges that can thoroughly discuss their health with
bridge inspectors. The project, led by Professor Jerry Lynch of the
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and EECS, is
developing a full range of interlocking technologies that will together
sense and collect bridge status data and make it available to inspectors.
The monitoring system is envisioned to collect data from several
different types of surface and penetrating sensors that detect cracks,
corrosion and other signs of weakness. The system would also measure the
effects of heavy trucks on bridges, which is currently impossible. Through
enhanced antennas and the Internet, the system would wirelessly relay the
information it gathers to an inspector on site or in an office miles away.
The EECS Team
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PI - Jerry
Lynch, CEE and EECS |
Mike Flynn and
Dennis Sylvester will be developing low cost, compact,
power- efficient, wireless sensing nodes that will be able to sense the
state of the infrastructure, and then communicate that information
wirelessly. Low cost is critical and a key goal is to reduce manufacturing
cost so that the nodes can be pervasive throughout the structure.
Dennis Sylvester will focus his expertise in ultra-low power CMOS design
to design an extremely low power microprocessor, on-chip temperature and
other sensors, and efficient power management circuits that will enable
orders of magnitude reductions in node volume and power consumption over
competing approaches. Building on his work with the
Phoenix processor, this lower power in turn enables
exciting new power harvesting schemes to be used, creating a very low-cost
solution with decades-long service lifetime.
Mingyan Liu will lead the effort in the networking component of the
project by designing the structural monitoring sensor network both for
distributed data collection, and as a smart distributed computing
fabric so as to greatly enhance its energy efficiency. This will be done
through the joint design of network communication and computation
algorithms, while taking into account special features of structural health
monitoring.
Amir Mortazawi and
Khalil Najafi will focus on techniques for energy scavaging. Mortazawi brings electromagnetic energy scavenging to the
project, harvesting energy from the radio frequency (RF) broadcast spectrum,
and from much larger quantities from radiation sources like IEEE 802.11 (WiFi)
or IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee) access points. Najafi will develop a novel
frequency up-converting scheme to scavenge energy from low-frequency
vibrations present on bridges and other physical structures. This approach
will convert the low frequency vibrations through a MEMS structure to high
frequency vibrations that are then efficiently converted to electrical power
using electromagnetic or piezoelectric techniques, and used by the
electronics and sensors.
Atul Prakash will be
developing methods of providing robust and secure communication between the
distributed low-power wireless sensors installed on the bridges, mobile data
vehicles, and data servers (jointly with research scientist Ralph Robinson
of the U-M Transportation Research Institute). He will also be
investigating, jointly with CEE Professor Vineet Kamat, techniques for
helping engineers to visualize the health of a bridge in the field on
head-mounted displays and computers, by leveraging knowledge about their
spatial location relative to the bridge.
An Interdisciplinary Approach that Serves an Interconnected World
This $19-million project is an exciting and instructive example of how
EECS is making significant impact on large-scale technical and societal
challenges through interdisciplinary research and development. The smart
bridge project brings together 14 researchers from within the College of
Engineering and the U-M Transportation Research Institute. In addition,
engineers at five private firms in New York, California, and Michigan are
key team members.
The project is funded by nearly $9 million from the National Institute of
Standards and Technology's (NIST) Technology Innovation Program (TIP). The
remaining funding comes from cost-sharing among the entities involved and
the Michigan Department of Transportation. MDOT has offered unfettered
access to state bridges to serve as high-visibility test-beds showcasing the
project technology.
See U-M
Press Release
Related Topics: Energy Scavenging Flynn, Michael Integrated Circuits and VLSI Liu, Mingyan MEMS and microsystems Mortazawi, Amir Najafi, Khalil Sensors Sylvester, Dennis
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