Smart infrastructure against earthquakes

SANTO DOMINGO. -The Technological advances they have permeated virtually every facet of the daily life of the society. Since mobile applications, refrigerators or cars, are equipped with sensors and programs that process information in real time and they help take decisions as the optimal route that must be taken to move.

What if the same concept were applied to civil infrastructure? What if civil infrastructure were equipped with sensors that allow detect if a structure Suffered damage durante a earthquake, in the same way that a sensor indicates on the dashboard of a car when the engine should be checked?

Smart infrastructures are civil infrastructures equipped with sensors that acquire information from a structure, before, during and / or after extreme events such as earthquakes and hurricanes, and use it to make a diagnosis of the state of integrity and safety of the structure.

These sensors measure the comportamiento of the structure and process the insights using computational algorithms that issue an alert when the structure has suffered some kind of damage or need an inspection, in the same way that a car emits an alert when the pressure of a tire or battery is outside a normal operating range that could jeopardize the safety of the user.

Today researchers of the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC) they work in development and implementation de methods to evaluate the structural vulnerability of intelligent infrastructures, using tip sensors what do they get digital signals of the movement experienced by these structures during extreme events.

The sensors consist of triaxial accelerometers that measure accelerations at different points of the structure and transmit them wirelessly to a central. The measurements are processed and used as input to computational probabilistic algorithms to calculate metrics that correlate to the state of integrity of the structure, detecting if it suffered significant damage and the possible extension of them.

In order to validate experimentally, a research projects., led by the doctor Kalil Erazo, specialist in the area, and financed by the National Fund for Innovation and Scientific and Technological Development (FONDOCYT), of the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology (MESCyT) And the INTEC, which included the instrumentation a bridge in Moca, Espaillat province. The bridge connects several communities and is within walking distance of the Northern fault, which is why it is located in an area of ​​high seismic danger.

El bridge was instrumented temporarily with a structural monitoring system, composed of several sensors de movement who acquired signals from on-site tests, and are currently working on their integrity assessment.

INTEC offers a master's degree in Structural and Earthquake-Resistant Engineering Sciences, which makes it a pioneer, in the Dominican Republic, in the training of specialists who respond effectively to the real needs that exist in this area, with a broad command of the fundamental and modern concepts of analysis and structural design.