Smart Cities / Smart Grids

DYNACAR: Techniques for a dynamic design of road infrastructures

The main objective of this project is to develop an ICT platform to monitor the status of infrastructure such as tunnels, bridges and roads. This project will develop a full-scale prototype to detect failures in the infrastructure at an early stage and suggest possible corrections including the redesign of some aspects.

Concrete is the most widely used building material worldwide due to its  low cost and because it many be used in buildings easily and in multiple ways. However, concrete structures are threatened by the action of environmental pollutants that penetrate through the porous structure of the material. This problem is not solved and the methods to prevent it are not economically competitive. In addition, the numerous existing concrete buildings are built with the aim of having the maximum possible useful life. This problem is especially important in the case of transport infrastructures such as tunnels and bridges, as the roads are the primary artery for the communication of people and trade.

As governments own most of the transport infrastructures perform periodic inspections to detect possible future damage and save repair costs, which representing between 20% and 40% of construction costs. That is why new, more reliable and cheaper testing methods are needed.

Researchers at the IIiA will develop a demonstrator which will highlight the advantages of continuous monitoring of the state of the infrastructure. The IIiA brings its expertise in 3D content creation and visualization and in analysis of scientific data in order to create a new interface running on mobile devices which will make  monitoring tasks easier.

At present, there are few methods to calculate the lifetime of the concrete due to the complexity of reproducing the environmental conditions. Therefore, resort to simplifications is needed. DYNACAR will not simplify the problem. Instead, it but will identify key parameters (indicators), and control their evolution in real conditions.

Given the lack of tools to easily tackle the problems associated with assessing the reliability of existing structures, DYNACAR will produce new models which will integrated the updated information provided by the indicators.