Smart Infrastructure

建造和维护桥梁和水坝等民用基础设施是社会面临的一项重大挑战。最近卡尔加里的弓河大桥和蒙特利尔的拉瓦尔大桥的失败突出了脆弱的基础设施对社会的风险。在这两种情况下，定期人工检查都未能发现这些结构的固有弱点。拟议的研究将调查新技术，旨在开发自动预警系统，以预测早期故障和控制设备，以保护结构免受暴力事件的影响。这项研究将包括理论发展和在实验室和实地进行的实验研究，从而为脆弱的基础设施提供更具成本效益的保护方法，并减少整个社会面临的风险。

Building and maintaining civil infrastructure such as bridges and dams is a major challenge to society. Recent failures of the Bow River bridge in Calgary and the Laval bridge in Montreal have underscored the risk of vulnerable infrastructure to the society. In both cases, periodic manual inspections failed to reveal inherent vulnerabilities in these structures. The proposed research will investigate new technologies directed at developing automated warning systems to predict incipient failures and control devices to protect structures from violent events. This research will include theoretical development and experimental studies in the laboratory and field, leading to more cost-effective protection methods to vulnerable infrastructure and a reduction in risk to the society as a whole.