Speaker: Farhad Ansari, PhD

Title: Instrumented Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges

Date: Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Time: 15:00 - 17:30

Venue: Room T3201

Abstract:

Bridges are important components of highway infrastructure system. Their structural health is vital for safe and efficient operation of the roadways. Highway bridges are subjected to a variety of loads and environmental perturbations, and in time they develop cracks and defects. In some cases, formation of cracks point to more serious issues such as errors in design and or in construction details. Detection of defects at their early stages of infancy will be essential for diagnosis and identification of damage and implementation of timely repairs and retrofit operations. In this presentation special techniques for structural health monitoring of Bridges by discrete and distributed optical fiber sensors will be introduced. The presentation will cover both basic research as well as practical applications in structural systems. In particular, applications and capabilities of FBG and PPP BOTDA based sensors for discrete and distributed detection of cracks and determination of loads in structural systems will be described. In particular, methods will be described for monitoring the weight of trucks in motion over the bridges, detection of cable tension loss in cable-stayed bridges, and monitoring of damage in multi-span bridges. The presentation will include both laboratory experiments as well as field applications.

About the speaker:

UIC Distinguished Professor Farhad Ansari, is the Christopher B. and Susan S. Burke Chair in Civil Engineering. He is acknowledged as the pioneer in applying optical fiber sensors for structural health monitoring and has consulted on and designed structural monitoring systems for bridges around the world, including New York's Brooklyn Bridge; the Lingotto Bridge in Turin, Italy; the Manhattan Bridge in New York City; and numerous other bridges in the United States. Professor Ansari served as the president of ISHMII society for 5 years from 2009 through 2014, and he is currently the editor-in-chief of the journal of civil structural health monitoring (JCSHM) published by Springer. Ansari completed his doctoral work in civil engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago after earning his master's degree from the University of Colorado and his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.