Innovator of the Year’s Technology Is Making Our Bridges and Structures Safer
Keeping structures like bridges, buildings, or airplanes safe is complex and expensive. UNH’s Innovator of the Year Yashar Azam has created techniques that could save money, use fewer resources, and possibly extend the life of these structures by 500%.
Using a concept known as digital twinning, Azam, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, develops virtual models that ingest real-time monitoring data from structures and evolve over time to estimate their health. His unique contribution to digital twinning, for which he’s received one patent and has two in process, is expanding their timescales to up to 100 years.
“Digital twins are digital replicas of existing assets,” such as bridges or other structures, says Azam. “What’s distinctive is that these digital replicas are evolving over time to try to be as close as possible to the actual structure.”
Monitoring for Structural Health and Sustainability
Azam’s innovations address the complexity of monitoring structures subject to a range of forces: wind, weather, and traffic on bridges; waves and saltwater on offshore wind turbines or oil and gas platforms; turbulence for aircraft.
Sensors on these structures provide some information on the state of their health and on factors that could strain and compromise them, but they can be very expensive. The U.S. has 630,000 bridges with approximately 5 million spans; using current technology, instrumenting each span could cost $100,000. Some of Azam’s work explores cost-effective methods of bridge monitoring, such as using vehicle-mounted sensors for bridge health assessments.
What’s more, the limited timescale of sensor technology produces incomplete information: Was that an earthquake that shook the bridge, or an unusually heavy truck? Was it a hurricane or a monthly King Tide that rocked a wind turbine? To deal with the sensor costs for bridges, part of Azam’s work deals with cost effective methods of bridge monitoring, such as using vehicle-mounted sensors for bridge health assessments.
By processing raw data from sensors with a physics-based model, Azam’s work provides information that not only indicates the health of a structure but can be used to extend its lifetime beyond mandated standards. Not only could that save billions of dollars, it has implications for sustainability as well.
“Even if you don’t care about the money, the less concrete you pour, the more environmentally friendly you are,” he says. “The ultimate goal is to keep our structures healthy: our bridges, buildings, aircraft, wind turbines. But you don’t want to be fixing a bridge before you need to. You don’t want to decommission a bridge if it has residual life.”
Impact Beyond Publishing Papers
While Azam’s research is cutting-edge and noteworthy, it’s his commitment to bringing it to market and translating its impact into real-world solutions that merits his Innovator of the Year honor, says Marc Eichenberger, associate vice president and chief business development and innovation officer at UNH.
“Through close partnership with UNH Innovation, he has moved multiple inventions from the lab to patented technologies and is now preparing to take the next step toward commercialization, with plans to pursue a spin?out of this work in the coming months,” Eichenberger says. “We are thrilled to celebrate a researcher whose innovations have the potential to transform how we protect critical infrastructure, from aerospace systems to bridges, delivering safer, smarter monitoring for communities worldwide.”
Azam is motivated, in part, by the high stakes of keeping our structures healthy. “I really want to have some impact in society in terms of safety, sustainability, and providing better ways of managing our infrastructure that’s more cost-effective and efficient,” he says. “I want to be able to have an impact beyond just educating people or publishing papers.”