Abstract: Railroads are one of the most critical components of the U.S. transportation system, accommodating transportation for 48% of the nation’s total modal tonnage. Despite such vital importance, more than half of railroad bridges, an essential component of railroad infrastructure in maintaining the flow of the network, were built before 1920; as a result, bridges comprise one of the most fragile components of the railroad system. Current structural inspection practices do not ensure sufficient information for both short- and long-term condition assessment while keeping the operational costs sufficiently low for mandatory annual inspection. In this talk, we present the development of an autonomous, affordable system for monitoring railroad bridges using the wireless smart sensors. A complete end-to-end wireless monitoring solution can provide relevant information directly from the bridges to the end-users at a fraction of the cost of traditional monitoring solutions. The system’s main contribution is to capture the train-crossing events efficiently and eliminate the need for a human-in-the-loop for remote data retrieval and post-processing. In the proposed system, an adaptive strategy combining an event-based and schedule-based framework is implemented. The wireless system addresses the challenges of continuous condition monitoring by completing the wireless data pipeline from smart sensors with edge computing capabilities to a scalable, cloud-based data management and visualization solution. To demonstrate the efficacy of this system, we present the results of a full-scale monitoring campaign on railroad bridges. By overcoming the challenges of monitoring railroad bridges wirelessly and autonomously, this system is expected to become an essential tool for bridge engineers and decision-makers.
Speaker: B.F. Spencer, Jr. received his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985. He worked on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame for 17 years before returning to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he currently holds the Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering and is the Director of the recently established UIUC-ZJU Joint Research Center on Center for Infrastructure Resilience in Cities as Livable Environments. His research has been primarily in the areas of structural health monitoring, structural control, cyberinfrastructure applications, stochastic fatigue, stochastic computational mechanics, and natural hazard mitigation. Dr. Spencer has directed more than $50M in funded research and published more than 700 technical papers/reports, including two books. He was the first to study and design magnetorheological (MR) fluid dampers for protection of structures against earthquakes and strong winds, overcoming the inherent limitations of existing passive energy dissipation systems, as well as power-dependent active control systems, which are in common use today. He led NSF's George E. Brown Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) system integration project, which constituted the nation's first engineering cyberinfrastructure initiative. He was the PI on the NEES MUST-SIM facility at the University of Illinois focusing on hybrid simulation. His most recent research on structural health monitoring systems and smart wireless sensors integrates advanced computing tools with smart sensors, to provide a functional platform with self-interrogation capabilities. He led the Jindo Bridge monitoring project in South Korea, which constitutes the world's largest deployment of wireless smart sensors to monitor civil infrastructure to date. Dr. Spencer has received numerous awards, including the ASCE Norman Medal, the ASCE Housner Structural Control and Monitoring Medal, the ASCE Newmark Medal, the ASCE Outstanding Instructor Award, the Zhu Kezhen International Lectureship Award, the ANCRiSST Outstanding Senior Investigator Award, the Structural Health Monitoring Person of the Year Award, the J.M. Ko Medal of Advances in Structural Engineering, IASCM Takuji Kobori Prize, and the Raymond & Sidney Epstein Structural Engineering Faculty Award. Dr. Spencer is a Fellow of ASCE, a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the North American Editor in Chief of Smart Structures and Systems, the Executive Managing Editor of the journal of Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Vibration, the past president of the Asia-Pacific Network of Centers for Research in Smart Structures Technology, and a Designated Foreign Expert by China's State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs.
