CAREER: Integrated Monitoring and Smart Damping for Dynamic Hazard Mitigation

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This Career Development Plan is a project of career-launching activities focused on the synergistic integration of structural health monitoring (SHM) and smart damping technologies to provide more reliable structures that respond better to natural hazards and are less-costly to maintain. Effective prioritization of post-disaster actions, as well as long-term safety monitoring, requires that the health of civil structures be well characterized. Yet, global SHM methods are largely ineffective in detecting local damage, whereas local methods require a cost-prohibitive number of sensors to monitor large civil structures. The thrust of this project is an innovative approach using variable stiffness and damping devices (VSDDs) to cause incremental changes in structural characteristics, multiplying the available information without adding additional sensors-a result not readily accomplished in a conventional structure. VSDDs can also effect significant vibration mitigation; thus, through this integration, VSDDs can serve multiple purposes, as well as strengthen their performance through more accurate updated models of structural characteristics. An outreach program to enthuse and interest future engineers will be developed using hands-on demonstrations and structural design competitions centered around small-scale seismic simulator exhibitions in K-12 classrooms. Further, animations and interactive virtual experiments will be designed using state-of-the-art programming languages like JAVA and MATLAB to demonstrate key concepts in structural dynamics, monitoring and control in a manner not possible with static media such as paper or chalkboard. This project will significantly impact the PI-challenging him to grow and mature as a professor, to learn and to mentor. Further, the project will facilitate the development of the next generation of intelligent civil engineering structures.