Engineering Commons^™

Hyperspectral Imaging Analysis Of Steel Corrosion, Abdullah Alhaj

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

No abstract provided.

A Hybrid-Climbing Robot For Steel Bridge Inspection, Thanh Son Nguyen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

No abstract provided.

Human Collaborative Haptic-Based Mobile-Manipulating Uavs, Dongbin Kim

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

No abstract provided.

Uav Aerodynamics Simulation: Model Building And Analysis, Pu Jiao

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

No abstract provided.

Simulation Training And Control System For Bridge Inspection, Rahul Dubey

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

No abstract provided.

Integrated Sensing System Of Fe-C Coated Long Period Fiber Gratings For Mass Loss Measurement Of Steel Bars With Strain And Temperature Compensation, Chuanrui Guo

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

No abstract provided.

A Training Framework Of Robotic Operation And Image Analysis For Decision-Making In Bridge Inspection And Preservation, Ruwen Qin

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Inspection and preservation of existing transportation infrastructure to extend their service life is an effective way of mitigating the pressure of steadily growing transportation demands on the aging infrastructure. Their current practice, though, represents one of the most costly operations in state departments of transportation.

The INSPIRE University Transportation Center will develop a remotely-controlled robotic platform that helps with these labor-intensive tasks and allows engineers to focus on decision-making processes. An important mission of INSPIRE is to leverage users’ capability of implementing, and interacting with, the robotic platform. Therefore, a long-term plan has been made to create a framework of …

Developing A Robotic Simulator And Video Games For Professional And Public Training, Sushil Louis

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Civil engineers are not educated with robotics. They need to be trained on the job with effective tools. The most recent simulation trainer that the PI has built is currently being used by the United States Navy to train surface warfare officers in decision making under stress. In a crowded in-port environment, the crew on a ship’s bridge is trained to probe and identify suspicious boat behavior within the port’s traffic pattern. Officers in charge of the simulation training lesson use software for high-level control of dozens of other ships, boats, and aircrafts that quickly react and adapt to the …

Quantitative Bridge Inspection Ratings Using Autonomous Robotic Systems, Anil Agrawal

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

The 2001 study sponsored by FHWA raised serious concern on the consistency and reliability of visual inspection. Although consistent ratings can be obtained with a good QA/QC program, based on a recent study by the PI, the concern for reliability of defect detection remains. With the adoption of the recent AASHTO Manuel for Bridge Element Inspection, the new inspection approach not only requires rating for bridge elements, but also the location and extent of deterioration. Since autonomous robotic systems generate an enormous amount of inspection data, deducing from the data to a simple rating along with the location and extent …

3d Microwave Camera For Concrete Delamination And Steel Corrosion Detection, R. Zoughi

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Corrosion of embedded steel reinforcement in concrete leads to concrete cracking and delamination, followed by increased salt and moisture permeation and further damage. Invisibility of the embedded rebar in combination with physical inaccessibility in elevated bridges presents a challenge in the assessment of RC bridge elements. Wideband (3D) microwave synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging techniques that can be integrated into a UAV offer a practical solution to overcome this challenge.

This project aims to develop and optimize a 3D microwave camera for bridge inspection on a UAV platform, quantify its performance for steel corrosion evaluation and concrete delamination detection in …

Hyperspectral Image Analysis For Mechanical And Chemical Properties Of Concrete And Steel Surfaces, Genda Chen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from approximately 400 to 700 nm. A hyperspectral camera can extend the wavelength to as high as 2500 nm. This extension will allow engineers to find objects, identify materials, and detect processes on structural surface, which cannot be done with visual inspection.

This project aims to develop an open-source catalogue of concrete and steel surfaces and their spectral/spatial features (discoloration, characteristic wavelength, roughness, texture, shape, etc.), extract spatial/spectral features of hyperspectral images, and develop/train a multi-class classification or regression classifier through machine learnings (supervised and/or semi-supervised), and validate the classifier as a …

Autonomous Ultrasonic Thickness Measurement By A Magnet-Wheeled Robot, Yang Wang

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

A wireless sensing device recently developed by PI Wang’s group has demonstrated various structural sensing capabilities for bridge applications. In the meantime, a latest robot platform developed by Dr. La’s group at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) demonstrates promising performance navigating on steel bridge members. Marrying the two state-of-the-art developments, this project will produce a magnet-wheeled robot capable of autonomous nondestructive measurement on steel bridge structures. Both laboratory and field validations will be performed.

This project will integrate advanced wireless sensing technologies to the UNR robot platform. At first, the functionality of ultrasonic thickness measurement will be developed on …

In-Line Long Period Grating And Brillouin Scattering Fiber Optic Sensors For Strain, Temperature, Chloride Concentration, And Steel Mass Loss Measurement In Bridge Applications, Chuanrui Guo

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Corrosion is the main reason for costly maintenance of aging transportation infrastructure in the U.S. Since 2008, the PI’s group has developed long period fiber grating (LPFG) sensors for point strain and steel mass loss measurements. When attached on a steel bar, a LPFG sensor doped with nano iron/silica particles and polyurethane can monitor the corrosion process of steel. However, the coating of particles with polyurethane was not robust. In addition, chloride concentration is important for the prediction of early corrosion in practice. Compared to grating sensors, Brillouin scattering based sensors have lower spatial resolution but offer a cost-effective solution …

2020 Technical Program, Inspire - University Transportation Center

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

INSPIRE University Transportation Center 2020 Annual Meeting
August 3-4, 2020

Defect Detection Of Concrete Structures Through Sounding Data Analytics, Ran Cao, Anil K. Agrawal

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Impact sounding has been recognized as an effective technique to detect delamination in concrete structures, such as concrete decks. An enormous amount of sounding data can be generated/collected by the autonomous inspection systems equipped with impactors and microphones. However, the main challenge in the practical application of this technology is the development of advanced data analysis approaches for identifying defects from impact sounding data. In this study, the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) analysis and power-spectral density (PSD) analysis are combined to extract useful features of sounding data generated by the impact hammer. It has been found that the EMD method …

Image Data Analytics To Support Engineers’ Decision-Making, Tianyi Zhao, Zhaozheng Yin, Ruwen Qin, Genda Chen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Robots such as drones have been leveraged to perform structure health inspection such as bridge inspection. Big data of inspection videos can be collected by cameras mounted on drones. In this project, we develop image analysis algorithms to support bridge engineers to analyze the big video data. Bridge engineers define the region of interest initially, then the algorithm retrieves all related regions in the video, which facilitates the engineers to inspect the bridge rather than exhaustively check every frame of the video. To perform this task, we propose a Multi-scale Siamese Neural Network. The network is initially trained by one-shot …

Updating Bridge Resilience Assessment Based On Corrosion And Foundation Scour Inspection Data, Yijian Zhang, Reginald Desroches, Iris Tien

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Aging and degradation of bridge structural components due to corrosion and scour create severe safety issues in the structural system and can lead to possible bridge failures. Collecting and analyzing inspection data provide a way to monitor and assess the safety condition of bridges. This paper proposes a framework to utilize collected inspection data to assess the condition of a bridge through updating both component- and system-level fragility curves of the bridge. Particularly, collected data such as mass loss of reinforcement and depth of scour hole are utilized to update the mechanical properties of structural members in the finite element …

Distributed Strain Measurements In A Steel-Concrete Composite Floor Beam Under Multi-Point Loading At Ambient Temperature, Matthew A. Klegseth, Yi Bao, Liang Fan, Genda Chen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

A 12.8 m-long composite floor beam consisting of a steel reinforced concrete slab with profiled metal decking supported by a W18×35 steel beam was tested under multi-point bending load at ambient temperature. Material strain and temperature were measured using fiber optic sensors. Measurements were taken along more than 150 m of fiber optic cables using Pre-Pump Pulse Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (PPP-BOTDA) and Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR). Along the beam centerline, three strain and two temperature fiber loops were placed to characterize the strain and temperature distribution along and through the depth of the concrete slab. The neutral …

Synchro-Squeezed Adaptive Wavelet Transform And Its Application To Impact Echo Signals For Pavement Defect Detection, Hongya Qu, Titantian Li, Genda Chen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

In this study, the recently-proposed adaptive wavelet transform (AWT) and synchro-squeezed adaptive wavelet transform (SSAWT) are introduced with their optimum transformation parameters automatically searched to derive at a desirable time-frequency representation of any dynamic response. The AWT enables the selectivity of time and frequency resolution in a domain of interest and the synchro-squeezing algorithm reduces the dispersion of a scalogram of the AWT, facilitating an accurate extraction of frequency features over time. The effectiveness of AWT is first demonstrated with an illustrative signal of four time segments covering various frequency distribution cases. In comparison with conventional wavelet transform, the AWT …

Evaluations Of Multiple Non-Destructive Techniques On Top And Bottom Surfaces Of A Reinforced Concrete Bridge Deck, Abdullah Alhaj, Hongya Qu, Haibin Zhang, Genda Chen, Neil Lennart Anderson, Evgeniy V. Torgashov

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

This study is intended to assess the integrity of a reinforced concrete bridge deck at the Missouri S&T campus using non-destructive testing (NDT) methods performed at top and bottom surfaces of the bridge deck. These utilized methods are named ground generating radar (GPR), impact echo (IE), and ultrasonic surface waves (USW). GPR was applied using 1.6 GHz and 2.5 GHz antennas to transmit and receive electromagnetic radio waves at embedded concrete reinforcement or distinct contacts between solid and loose concrete materials with different dielectric properties. Due to significant variations of the apparent depth to top of the embedded reinforcing steel …

Microwave High-Resolution 3d Sar Imaging Of Corroded Reinforcing Steel Bars In Mortar Subjected To Accelerated Electrochemical Corrosion, Chao Liu, Stephona Barker, Liang Fan, Mohammad Tayeb Ahmad Ghasr, Genda Chen, R. Zoughi

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Corrosion of reinforcing steel bars (rebars) embedded in concrete is a significant maintenance, rehabilitation and safety issue as it relates to the overall health of concrete structures, particularly those subjected to cyclical chloride attack. Over the years several inspection methods have been used to detect and assess this corrosion with limited success. Wideband microwave imaging, using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) techniques, has shown great potential for producing 3D images of structures containing rebars. Although these investigations have shown great promise, a methodical approach to investigate the overall efficacy of this imaging technique has not yet taken place. Steel corrosion byproduct …

Assessing Moisture Content On The Surface Of Mortar Samples From Hyperspectral Imaging, Liang Fan, Abdullah Alhaj, Hongyan Ma, Genda Chen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Hyperspectral imaging represents an electromagnetic spectrum for each pixel in the image of a structural surface. The characteristic wavelength of the spectrum at reflectance valleys or absorption peaks can be used as a spectral feature for certain chemical detection. In this study, spectral reflectance characteristics of mortar samples are extracted to assess the reduction of moisture on the surface of mortar samples during the cement hydration process. The test results indicate that the reflectance increases and the absorbance decreases because water is reacted and less light will be absorbed during the hydration process. The average absorbance between 1923 nm and …

Thermally-Stable Passive Wireless Antenna Sensor For Strain Sensing, Dan Li, Yang Wang

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Passive wireless antenna sensors have been studied in recent years as a novel approach for strain sensing. Electromagnetic resonance frequency of the antenna sensor, which is bonded on a base structural surface like a strain gage, depends on antenna dimension. When the dimension changes due to strain in the base structure, the wirelessly identified resonance frequency shift can be used to estimate the strain in the structure. Due to the multi-physics nature, both mechanical and dielectric properties of the antenna affect the resonance frequency. One drawback of previous antenna sensors is the relatively large resonance frequency fluctuation due to temperature …

Corrosion Induced Mass Loss Measurement Under Various Strain Levels Through Gr/Agnw-Based, Fe-C Coated Lpfg Sensors, Chanrui Guo, Liang Fan, Genda Chen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

In this study, three Gr/AgNW-based, Fe-C coated long period fiber gratings (LPFG) corrosion sensors were prepared and tested for corrosion-induced mass loss measurements under various strain levels. Graphene grew on a copper foil using a low pressure chemical vapor deposition, was transferred to the curve surface of each LPFG sensor, and strengthened by silver nanowire (AgNW) for a more robust electroplating process of the Fe-C layer. The three Fe-C coated LPFG sensors were subjected to three different strain levels: 0, 500 and 1000 με. The sensors were immersed up to 72 hours in 3.5% w.t NaCl solution. Both optical transmission …

Uav-Based Smart Rock Positioning For Determination Of Bridge Scour Depth, Haibin Zhang, Zhaochao Li, Alec Reven, Buddy Scharfenberg, Genda Chen, Jinping Ou

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

This study aims to predict the depth of scour hole developed around a bridge pier with one smart rock. A 3-axis magnetometer was assembled on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to measure magnetic fields before and after the smart rock has been deployed as the UAV flew around the bridge pier. A 3-axis high resolution GPS unit was fixed on the UAV to ensure accurate measurements of the latitude, longitude and altitude of the magnetometer. The GPS and the magnetometer measurements were synchronized to output the coordinate and magnetic field intensity correspondingly. A simple optimization algorithm was used to predict …

Considerations For Hose Wielding Uav For Civil Infrastructure Cleaning, Blake Hament, Paul Oh

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

To expand the capabilities of a multi-rotor aerial vehicle, one or several hoses could be mounted to the vehicle. Such hoses could be used to expel compressed air or other fluid for the purpose of cleaning hard-to-reach surfaces. The main challenge in operating a hose mounted on a free-flying aerial vehicle is compensating for the reaction forces and torques the vehicle experiences as fluid leaves the hose. This paper introduces dynamic modeling for a hose mounted on a multi- rotor vehicle. It is shown that safe operating ranges can be defined in terms of hose angle and fluid PSI, with …

Visual Shm For Concrete Infrastructure Using A Wall-Climbing Robot, Liang Yang, Yong Chang, Biao Jiang, Jizhong Xiao

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Concrete structural health monitoring (SHM) is urgently required with more and more severe aging problems happen. Conventional manual inspection approach is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a wall-climbing robotic approach for visual inspection of concrete structures using a deep neural network and 3D semantic reconstruction to build a 3D map overlaid with defects. The wall-climbing robot uses a negative pressure module to operate on both vertical and horizontal surfaces. An RGB-D camera is mounted in the robot with an Intel-NUC computer as visual positioning and image processing core to make metric measurement, Our main contribution is the …

Roller Chain-Like Robot For Steel Bridge Inspection, Son Thanh Nguyen, Hung Manh La

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

This paper presents a novel design of steel bridge/structure inspection robot. Compared to most existing robots designed to work on particular surface contour of steel structures such as flat or curving, the proposed roller chain-like robot can implement and transfer smoothly on many kind of steel surfaces. The developed robot can be applied to inspection tasks for steel bridges with complicated structures. The robot is able to carry cameras, sensors for visual and specialized examination. Rigorous analysis of robot kinematics, adhesion force and turn-over failure has been conducted to demonstrate the stability of the proposed design. Mechanical and magnetic force …

A Genetic Algorithm For Minmax K-Chinese Postman Problem With Applications To Bridge Inspection, Siming Liu, Sushil J. Liu, N. Harris, Hung Manh La

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

Bridge inspections ensure transportation infrastructure safety and save lives but current manual bridge inspections can be slow and costly. Automated bridge inspection research mitigates these problems and we investigate a multirobot approach to automated bridge inspection by mapping the inspection problem to the well known k-Chinese Postman problem and using multiple robots for faster, more cost-effective, and more standardized bridge inspections. We first show that a genetic algorithm quickly approaches the optimal solution to the 1-postman problem corresponding to a single robot inspecting a bridge. Then, we use the same genetic algorithm to efficiently solve the more difficult, multi-robot, NP-hard, …

Unmanned Aerial And Traversing Robot As Mobile Platform For Bridge Inspections, Alec M. Reven, Clayton A. Fritsche, Genda Chen

INSPIRE-UTC Annual Meetings

In this study, a bridge inspection robot deployment system (BIRDS) is designed, prototyped, and tested to facilitate the remote inspection of bridges with nondestructive evaluation tools such as microwave and hyperspectral cameras. The multimodal robotic system utilizes both flying and driving technologies. First, BIRDS as an unmanned aerial vehicle flies to the underside of the bridge to be inspected. When in position, BIRDS is engaged with the bottom flange of a bridge girder with a specifically designed roller clamping system and then traverses the bridge in a stable manner, providing high quality images from cameras. Finally, BIRDS simply detaches from …