Time: 9:30-11:30am, Nov 7
Venue: Floor 2 Meeting Room, UMSJTU Joint Institute

Smart Sensing Technology: A New Paradigm for Structural Health Monitoring
B.F. Spencer, Jr.
 
Biography: B.F. Spencer, Jr. received his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985. He worked on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame for 17 years before returning to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he currently holds the Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering and is the Director of the Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory. His research has been primarily in the areas of smart structures, stochastic fatigue, stochastic computational mechanics, and natural hazard mitigation.  He is a Fellow of ASCE, a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the North American Editor in Chief of Smart Structures and Systems, and the president of the Asia-Pacific Network of Centers for Research in Smart Structures Technology.
 
Abstract: The ability to continuously monitor the integrity of civil infrastructure in real-time offers the opportunity to reduce maintenance and inspection costs, while providing for increased safety to the public. Furthermore, after natural disasters, it is imperative that emergency facilities and evacuation routes, including bridges and highways, be assessed for safety. Addressing all of these issues is the objective of structural health monitoring (SHM).
 
Smart sensors densely distributed over structures can provide rich information for structural health monitoring using their sensing, computational, and wireless communication capabilities. Though smart sensor technology has seen substantial advances during recent years, implementation of smart sensors on full-scale structures has been limited; interdisciplinary efforts to address issues in sensors, networks, and application specific algorithms have only now begun to germinate. Following an overview of these issues, a new paradigm for structural health monitoring employing a network of smart sensors will be presented. Because of its ability to meet the demands of data intensive applications such as SHM, Intel’s Imote2 is adopted for this research. The system is deployed to monitor the Jindo Bridge, a cable-stayed bridge in South Korea with a 344m main span.  This project constitutes the world’s largest deployment of wireless sensors to monitor civil infrastructure and signifies a new paradigm for structural health monitoring that is leading to dramatic improvements over existing capabilities.  

Bio-inspired Flow Sensors at the Marco, Micro and Nano-scale
Prof. Alison Flatau
 
Biography: Prof. Flatau is the Associate Dean of Research and a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. She is an active researcher in the fields of smart materials, bio-inspired sensing and actuation technologies and active flow control.  Prof. Flatau’s current research activities include the development and application of magnetostrictive material and their use as actuators and sensors, and the application of smart materials in meso- and micro-systems, including synthetic jet design for active flow control and bio-inspired micro- and nano-sensors. She joined Maryland after serving as Program Director for the Dynamic Systems Modeling, Sensing and Control Program at the National Science Foundation from 1998-2002.  Prior to that, she was on the Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics faculty at Iowa State University (1990-1998).  Her experience also includes four years at the National Small Wind Systems Test Center in Golden, CO (now NREL) where she was a Senior Research Engineer in the Wind Energy Conversion Systems Test Program. 

Abstract: Nature has equipped flora and fauna with robust and responsive sensors enabling them to obtain accurate data of the environment. Many of these sensors take the form of hair cell sensors. Prof. Flatau’s research group is investigating iron-gallium (Galfenol, Fe100?xGax, 10 ≤ x ≤ 25 at. %) alloys as candidates for use in macro, micro and nano-scale sensors as the transduction elements that convert mechanical flow into loads that produce bending deflections of wires made of Galfenol, and in turn produce a re-orientation of magnetic moments within the Galfenol wires. Our lab is producing the macroscale wires that are inspired by whiskers or vibrissae found in many mammals. We collaborate with Prof. Stadler at the Univ. Minn. as her research group makes Galfenol nanowires that we are characterizing for development of MEMs and nano-wire –based sensor components. These are inspired by and of the same dimensions as cilia found in inner ear hair cells.

Bio-inspired Sensing Skins for Structural Health Monitoring
Dr. Jerome Lynch
 
Biography: Dr. Jerome Lynch is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan; he is also holds a courtesy faculty appointment with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  Dr. Lynch completed his graduate studies at Stanford University where he received his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2002, MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1998, and MS in Electrical Engineering in 2003. Prior to attending Stanford, Dr. Lynch received his BE in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Cooper Union in New York City.  His current research interests are in the areas of wireless structural monitoring, feedback control systems, and sustainable built environments.  Specifically, Dr. Lynch’s work aims towards addressing challenging problems associated with the health of aging infrastructure systems and the performance of infrastructure during and after natural hazard events.  Some of Dr. Lynch’s more current research has been focused on the design of building automation systems based on wireless decentralized control architectures.  Dr. Lynch was recently awarded the 2005 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, 2007 University of Michigan Henry Russel Award, 2008 College of Engineering (University of Michigan) 1938E Award, 2009 NSF CAREER Award and the 2010 Rackham Distinguished Faculty Award.  He was also featured by Popular Science magazine in their 2009 “Brilliant 10” annual issue. 
 
Abstract: The deteriorating state of aging infrastructure systems is a major concern of the civil engineering community.  Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems have emerged to offer a cost-effective health management solution for structural owners and managers.  While SHM technology has rapidly advanced in recent years, technical challenges still remain, thereby rendering the task of automated damage detection difficult to implement.  The current state-of-art in sensing and actuation technologies stands to benefit from new approaches to technology development.  A complete paradigm shift is currently possible through the mimicking of highly optimized biological sensing and actuation concepts found throughout nature.  In this paper, a new sensing skin for distributed sensing of civil infrastructure is proposed based on the sensing principles of the human dermatologic system.  Nanotechnology is leveraged to direct the structured assembly of a carbon nanotube thin film designed to change electrical properties due to strain, damage and pH.  Laboratory illustrations of pH and damage sensing are presented herein.
 
Non-intrusive and Multi-modality Sensing in Human-Machine Interactions
 
Biography: Yingzi Lin is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, where she directs the Intelligent Human-Machine Systems Laboratory and co-directs the Virtual Environments Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Saskatchewan. She has published over 100 technical papers in referred journals and conferences. Her area of expertise includes: intelligent human-machine systems, smart sensing systems, multimodality information fusion, human machine interface design, and human friendly mechatronics. Dr. Lin is the Chair of the Virtual Environments Technical Group of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES). She is on the committees of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academy of Sciences. She serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans, and Structural Health Monitoring: An International Journal.
 
Abstract: The presenter will be focused on multi-modal biosensing and cognitive inference paradigm for human-machine systems, which has been carried out in her research group in the past few years. Drawing upon bio-inspired cognitive concepts, a very important and nontraditional engineering topic on non-intrusive biosensing of human physiological signals has been identified and investigated. The sensing and cognitive system benefits various disciplines in which human-machine interaction is involved, which lead to huge impacts on public safety and human health.
 
Dr. Shih-Chi Liu
Biography: Program Director , Sensors & Sensing Systems, Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI), National Science Foundation(NSF). Dr Liu received his BS in Civil Engineering from  National Taiwan University in 1960 and PhD in Civil and Earthquake Engineering from  University of California, Berkeley in 1967.  Dr. Liu  have eight years (1967-1975) of active research at Bell Laboratories, Whippany, New Jersey in the general areas of structural/earthquake engineering, soil structure interaction, seismic risk analysis, optimal design, random vibration, ground motion studies, and probabilistic/statistical methods in engineering applications.  He has over thirty years’ (1975 to present) experience in research program development, initiation, and management with National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Liu has received numerous awards and recognitions including honorary professorships from Tonji University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Lanzhou University of Technology. Dr. Liu has more than 100 journal and proceedings papers and authored 8 books and book chapters.
 
Abstract: An rapidly growing cross-disciplinary field of research in biosensing and bioactuation (BSBA) has emerged to enable engineering investigators to work with bio scientists, bio materialists and other specialists to discover new knowledge in living systems and to understand their interface with engineering systems.  These discoveries could lead to innovations in bio-inspired technologies. The common national-need application areas for use of such advanced technologies are very broad including infrastructure protection and sustainability, detection of environmental pollution and security agents, and natural disaster forecasting and mitigation representing transformative impacts to the society. National Science Foundation (NSF) made twelve BSBA interdisciplinary team research awards under a FY 09 EFRI initiative. These projects are expected to pioneer a long-term research frontier overlaying multiple traditional disciplinary domains and lead to the next generation of engineering systems with capacity of autonomy, cognition, self monitoring and self-renewal, A report on advanced sensors research in the USA and on this BSBA program will be presented in this paper. Opportunities and planned actions for international research collaboration in this area with Europe, Japan, China, and Korea etc. have been actively pursued. An updated account of such collaborative programs will be also presented.