Sensors for Smart Civil Infrastructure

Design, construction, maintenance and upgrading of civil engineering infrastructure requires fresh thinking to minimize use of materials, energy and labor. This can be achieved by understanding the performance of the infrastructure, both during its construction and throughout its design life, through innovative monitoring. Advances in sensor systems offer intriguing possibilities to radically alter methods of condition assessment and monitoring of infrastructure. This talk will focus on the future of infrastructure; the rich information obtained from embedded sensors within infrastructure will act as a catalyst for new design, construction, operation and maintenance processes for integrated infrastructure systems linked directly with user behavior patterns. New generation sensor technologies offer intriguing possibilities that can alter the paradigms underlying existing methods of condition assessment and monitoring. The talk will introduce several case studies of applying technologies for monitoring the conditions of civil infrastructure and discuss how engineering decisions can made from the new sets of data.

Speaker: Kenichi Soga, UC Berkeley