FEATURE SENSORS AND DETECTORS
The pulse of the city
Jessica Rowbury finds that sensor technology is impacting the design, engineering, and management of infrastructure
T
he quality and performance of city infrastructure is essential for supporting economic growth, long-term sustainability and for boosting the quality of life for its inhabitants. Amid global challenges such as ageing populations, climate change, and population growth, modern city infrastructure must be robust and adaptable – as well as optimised in terms of efficiency, cost, low carbon footprint and service quality.
Sensor technology is being integrated into key structures within cities to help engineers understand a structure’s performance over time, and help determine the best way in which to manage and improve key elements of infrastructure. The technology is also helping make cities ‘smart’, whereby sensor and data management technologies are used to make cities more resilient, energy efficient and liveable. In May, a new facility that will support world- leading research in the area of smart infrastructure was opened at the University of Cambridge. The James Dyson Building for Engineering contains fibre-optic sensors in its foundation piles that act as a ‘building nervous system’, offering live data of temperature and strain and therefore an insight into how the building is behaving. ‘To my knowledge, this is one of the densest ever installations of fibre optics in a building – we have two kilometres of fibre optics installed in a small section of a building, which gives us an unprecedented level of detail in terms of observing how the building behaves,’ said Dr Nicky de Battista, research associate at Cambridge University’s Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction. According to de Battista, the purpose of having such a dense network of fibre optic sensors
22 ELECTRO OPTICS l JUNE 2016
James Dyson opened the Dyson Centre for Engineering Design in May. The development of the facility was funded by a £8m donation from the James Dyson Foundation
within the building structure is twofold. First of all, as part of Cambridge University’s Engineering Department, the new James Dyson building acts as an educational tool. ‘When students are learning in the classroom about what a beam does when you put a load on it, students can actually be taken into the James Dyson building…. The lecturer can show, in real time, what a group of 20 students standing on a beam can do to the beam itself. So, that’s the first objective, to have a sort of “living classroom”,’ he said.
The second objective is to observe any long- term changes to help engineers understand how buildings of this type behave, which could lead to revisions of the way buildings are designed. ‘It helps with the long-term understanding of a structure’s performance,’ de Battista added. In addition to research purposes, Cambridge University’s Centre for Smart Infrastructure and
Construction (CSIC) has integrated fibre optic sensors for ‘real-world’ projects, such as in bridges for the UK’s Network Rail, and tunnels for Crossrail, a new high-frequency, high-capacity railway for London and the south east of England. Monitoring through the use of fibre optic sensors can be carried out for short periods – for example during parts of the construction phase – or for longer durations, such in the case of the Network Rail bridges, for determining how train loads affect the structure’s performance over the bridge’s lifetime.
‘This [long-term] monitoring will give you a kind of “health passport” of the bridge, which shows its structural performance before it was commissioned, and which can then be compared to data collected at stages throughout the life of the bridge,’ explained de Battista. In the future, this fibre optic sensing approach
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