CAREER: Loading on Coastal Bridges in Windstorms Using Rapidly Deployable Sensor Network

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program grant seeks to transform coastal bridge resilience through cyberinfrastructure supported extreme event observations. The damaging effects of severe windstorms including hurricanes on infrastructure of coastal bridges highlight the need for new tools to provide fundamental knowledge of windstorm impacts on infrastructure. This award supports fundamental research to establish a rapidly deployable, bridge-located observation network to lay the groundwork for capturing measurements of wind, surge, wave, and scour and analysis of bridge responses during a severe storm such as a hurricane. These efforts will enhance coastal bridge health management decisions as well as design and reliability models through the analysis of hurricane load and response data. A full-scale prototype of this system deployed on a bridge with interactive system will provide students at all academic levels the opportunity to interact with an in-service bridge and visualize the impacts of bridge management decisions. The rapidly deployable bridge-hurricane observation network will advance fundamental knowledge of the loadings and responses of bridges in coastal storms. The introduction of wireless smart sensor networks has promise of transforming bridge management; however, their potential has been restricted by static application software that is unable to respond to changing monitoring conditions. Under this CAREER program, a cyberinfrastructure enabled dynamically reconfigurable smart sensor framework will be created based on mobile agents. These are the software programs that traverse the wireless sensor network and act intelligently to facilitate network and sensor functionality in response to changes in the bridge loading and response. To realize the full benefits of the bridge monitoring framework, there should be a link between the data it produces and effective bridge management decisions. This link will be pursued by coupling extreme event data with advanced bridge response and windstorm phenomena simulation tools to enable the development of accurate coastal bridge reliability models.