CEC - A Smart Bridge in Tennessee

When
23 Aug 2021
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
online
Registered
62 registrants

Registration is closed

Chattanooga Engineers Club

Joint meeting with ASCE and TSPE Chattanooga

Monday, August 23, 2021

12:00 noon - 1:00 pm

Presentation:

A Smart Bridge in Tennessee

Speaker:

Dr. Dayakar Penumadu, Fred N. Peebles Professor in UT’s Tickle College of Engineering and Characterization Fellow for Materials and Processing

On the surface, it may look like any other two-lane bridge you have driven over.

But a new high-tech bridge in north central Tennessee is equipped with a fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite material bridge deck embedded with fiber optic sensors. This might be a solution for many failing bridges. This new bridge replaced a damaged old concrete crossing which was rated structurally deficient and outdated. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, about 8 percent of the more than 617,000 bridges in the US are structurally deficient and need repair.

For this project, researchers and engineering students in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Fibers and Composites Manufacturing Facility embedded smart fiber optic sensors developed by Luna Innovations into the bridge surface during production.

Dr. Dayakar Penumadu, will talk about integrating new materials and structures. Due to bridge decks being the most damage-prone elements, smart sensors are distributed throughout the composite bridge deck to provide performance data for years to come.

Dr. Penumadu holds PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology, MS from University of Kentucky and Purdue University, and BS from Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India.

Online access information will be provided to registered participants before the meeting date.

This event should qualify for 1 PDH.