pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

On Friday, January 29, 2016, Dr. Yahong Rosa Zheng gave an invited PacTrans seminar on the UW Seattle Campus. Dr. Zheng came from Missouri University of Science and Technology (MUST) where she is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

While Dr. Zheng’s connections with Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and PacTrans may not appear immediately obvious, she has a history of collaboration with CEE faculty at her university and gave a highly relevant talk about possible means to monitor structural health. Specifically, she discussed a system that can be used to monitor bridge scour and communicate such information to necessary authorities (e.g., bridge operation and maintenance crews) via underwater communications. Scour, a process which involves movement of rocks/sediment away from portions of bridge piers located underwater, can cause structural failure due to instability and thus is an issue which needs to be frequently monitored. By placing communications equipment within man-made “rocks” near the bridge piers, Dr. Zheng and her colleagues at MUST have developed a system capable of dispatching key information on scour as it occurs.

Besides the development of the system itself, Dr. Zheng discussed some of the issues that make underwater wireless communications significantly more complicated and prevent conventional technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi from being used. Ultimately, it seems that development of systems to monitor the health of structures, such as highway bridges, with portions of the structure located underwater or underground in a low-cost and effective manner is not far from widespread use!

PacTrans would like to expend a special thanks to Dr. Zheng for making the trip and sharing with us the great work that she is currently undertaking.