Remote Infrastructure Monitoring Assessment via Multispectral Imaging of Surface Coatings

Drexel University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Our country's aging and deteriorating infrastructure creates the need for transformative science and technology that can assist in novel management and maintenance approaches. This award supports fundamental research on monitoring, measurement, analysis and computations in support of system diagnostics, applicable to a civil infrastructure. Examples include bridges, railroads, masonry buildings, networks of pipelines, powerlines, dams and more. This award investigates multispectral imaging through novel coatings that act as selectively responsive sensing units when deposited on actual structural components and monitored by appropriate imaging devices. The results of this award could be used to implement unprecedented structural health monitoring procedures which combined with the use of unmanned aerial systems developed to perform such measurements in highly dynamic environments have the potential to radically reduce downtime associated with lengthy and costly maintenance operations. In addition, they may offer the capability of both earlier and more quantitative identification of deterioration and damage. Therefore, results of this research are expected to benefit the U.S economy and society as it targets major improvements in manufacturing, monitoring and analysis methods with applications in urban systems, sustainability and resiliency of infrastructure. The broader impact of this research focuses in enhancing the efforts for cross-cutting progress in restoration and improvement of urban infrastructure. In this context of civic engagement, the research will leverage resources within the PIs' institution co-operative educational program to transfer related knowledge in educational curricula and train the next generation of engineers working in the area of system diagnostics. Multimodal remote sensing instrumentation platform coupled with scalable manufacturing and autonomous aerial vehicles will create a framework to rapidly assess the condition of infrastructure systems. Three research objectives in this project are targeted: the use of novel manufacturing procedures in a context of a materials-by-design and advances in metamaterials for the creation of unprecedented opportunities for scalable, tunable, multimodal, multispectral and embedded coatings for automated inspection and deformation quantification; the use of unmanned aerial systems equipped with multi-spectral sensors capable to measure deformation through interrogation of the coatings; the development of methodologies to combine multispectral image point clouds, as well as other sources of information with multiscale and multimodal modeling for state awareness and remaining useful life predictions. Specifically, novel manufacturing procedures will be adopted to design surface coatings and embed them in structural components. The properties of the coatings will be tailored to guarantee their rapid detection by multispectral sensing capturing ultraviolet and infrared radiation as well as visible light. The relative position of the coating elements will be tracked using dedicated algorithms based on computer vision and photogrammetry used to quantify local and global position coordinates of the monitored structures.