[SOUND].
What I call structural health monitoring what really deals with monitoring the
health of infrastructure, be it smart buildings, as you can see here
I should also mention that many of these graphics have been taken from this
company with permission called Libelium and I promised them that I would
acknowledge them in my talk. So as you can see in your slides, there
is an example of of an apartment building in Shanghai that fell down just recently.
In 2009. Fortunately, it turned out that nobody
was killed, because the apartment building was largely unoccupied at the
time it fell down, and so a sensor network could have helped monitor the
potential structural fidelity of this building.
Another example which I think most of you are probably familiar with was the recent
collapse of the Minnesota Bridge which happened, I think, in 2007 where there
was a design flaw and resulted in the, in the entire bridge collapsing.
And actually a friend of mine was very, very close to that bridge when it
collapsed and it turned out he was, he was fine but A, a fair number of people
who are hurt or even killed. So this is very, very important that we,
especially as our infrastructure in the United States grows old, we maintain it,
we monitor it, and make sure that appropriate action is taken.
to make repairs before such calamities take place.
And yes sensor systems could actually be very very helpful.
So first thing that you can think of sensor system would be able to do would
be provide real time monitoring. So it would potentially transmit data to
a fusion center. And based on analysis at some fusion
center, now this fusion center could reside close to these bridges or it could
be far away. It could be communivated for example
through multiple layers of networks including the internet.
And based on the analysis of the data. one could generate appropriate levels of
alerts. And these levels of alerts could be, hey
we need human intervention. You know, this particular pillar looks
like it's not going to last too long and we better reenforce it very, very quickly
or it could simply mean. That this type of wind dynamics or load
dynamics are causing some structural harmonics to take place, which may
result, for example, far more oscillation taking place on the bridges or buildings
than the buildings or bridges are capable of handeling in the long run.
So what you might want to do, you might want to put appropriate dampers.
So right now, I, I'm aware of certain very tall buildings having these very
large weights, very large actuators at the bottom to try to stabilize this.
But if they could be provided with realtime feedback, realtime information
On the details of how the buildings operating.
Then these [UNKNOWN] us could be invoked in a more proactive way to prevent wear
and tear of these buildings. So this is a way in which sensor networks
could not only prevent calamities but could also lend the lifetime of a
building. While preventing costly repairs from
taking place. So that's, that's a big advantage of this
technology.