Sensor Technologies for Civil Infrastructures


The oldest of all of the engineering disciplines, Civil Engineering, enjoys a

proud history of providing society with infrastructure systems to ensure economic

prosperity and a high quality of life. In recent years, a number of grand

challenges have emerged that fundamentally jeopardize the profession’s







ability to continue designing and maintaining infrastructure

with the high level of performance as experienced in the past. For example, structures

in urban environments are seeing unprecedented levels of demand from growing

populations leading to higher levels of deterioration occurring at faster rates. This

is an especially demanding issue for civil engineers in developed nations who are

now dealing with a growing number of infrastructure components

exceeding their intended design lives (typically half a century). It is

costlier to maintain the safe operating condition of aging infrastructure.


Another

challenge for civil engineers is the need to continue to improve the

design of their infrastructure to withstand extreme loadings associated with natural hazard

events including earthquakes and tropical storms. An especially pressing

challenge is the frequent occurrence of failures at points of

interconnection between two or more interdependent infrastructure

systems. Unfortunately, functional interdependencies create

the potential for cascading failures that can result in systemic disasters.

A case in point was the progression of infrastructure

system failures that occurred during both Hurricane Katrina (2005,

New Orleans) and the Tohoku Earthquake (2011, Japan). The

breaching of the levees in New Orleans led to cascading failures

that ultimately crippled an entire city; to this day, New Orleans has not

fully recuperated from this natural disaster. The Tohoku Earthquake


offered another case of cascading failures

with the failure of a protective sea wall setting off a chain reaction of failures

leading to the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactors; Fukushima remains

an ongoing disaster with major public health implications for the coming century.


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