Sensor Technologies and Applications for Smart Roads and Smart Buildings

Smart System Integration (SSI) principles currently have widespread applications in the societal infrastructure sector addressing critical needs of safety, quality of environment and energy conservation applications. This is easy to understand since SSI approaches provide a small and cost-effective approach to monitoring and controlling the many environments surrounding us vis-à-vis the utilization of broad selection of sensors in their front end. In addition to these front end sensors, Smart Systems also include a diverse array of other functions including signal conditioning circuits (e.g. ASICs with embedded microcontrollers), energy sources, and communication back ends….either wired or wireless and all assembled and packaged. The sensors, when linked together to form a network are frequently referred to as Wireless Autonomous Sensor Networks (WASNs).

Major opportunities for these Smart System Integration solutions currently exist in structural bridge monitoring. In the US alone, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has recently reported that there are over 583,000 bridges and of these over 25% are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. ASCE also reports that of the 76,926 dams that exist in the US of which 1,819 have high hazard potential. Various organizations including the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois have been developing solutions to monitor these and other civil engineering structures including dams, buildings, levees and pipelines.

Additionally, infrastructure monitoring has expansive applications in building monitoring from a structural, energy management, security and quality of environment perspectives. The US census reported that there are over 160 million households in the US and it is reported that there are 1.7 billion households internationally. Most provide heating (and many also provide cooling) to their inhabitants. This is in addition to commercial buildings. WASNs are critical to the efficient monitoring and control of these systems especially in these times of minimizing the systems’ thermal footprint and minimizing energy consumption.

This presentation will address several of the systems currently in use and/or under development at commercial organizations and research facilities in the US to be able to monitor and control these infrastructure applications. Applications include bridge monitoring, smart roads (traffic control and parking) and smart buildings. We will present functional analysis of the systems, address specific elements of the systems (with a focus on sensors) and provide measured results to establish the feasibility and efficacy of such approaches.