Computational and Sensing Vitamins for Construction and Infrastructure

Principal Investigator: Dr Phillip Stanley-Marbell 
Trimble contact: Jim Coleman 

Project Description:

Today, the ability to model and visualize the internal forces in structures ends at the design stage with tools such as finite element analysis. Sensors attached to infrastructure can provide a limited amount of in-life telemetry, but naive deployment of sensors generates large amounts of data that must be transmitted to a central location for analysis. This mass extraction of data is wasteful of energy resources of the sensors and the centralized analysis of the data fails to account for the structural design, materials, and context of the physical environment from which the data were sensed.

This project will build on ongoing research in the Physical Computation
Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (http://physcomp.eng.cam.ac.uk) to develop miniaturized sensors that can be integrated into building materials and into built environments.