The development of suitable structural health monitoring systems and decision support tools for the efficient management of deteriorating reinforced concrete bridges in earthquake-prone areas is a key factor towards the establishment of a resilient and sustainable transportation network. This, in turn, requires the elaboration of proper solutions to cope with the territorial scale of the problem at hand, since bridges are usually key elements of large and complex transportation networks. The concept of smart city is especially useful to achieve these ambitious goals, because a smart city strives to integrate all its structures, infrastructures and services into a cohesive whole, by using intelligent solutions for monitoring, assessing and control, in order to ensure the required performance levels. Within this framework, the main objectives of the present project are twofold. The first objective deals with the analysis of smart devices for monitoring RC bridges subjected deterioration phenomena. The second objective is concerned with the development of decision support tools for the seismic assessment of degrading RC bridges in seismic areas.
The present project is intended to elaborate innovative smart technologies and decision support tools for the assessment of deteriorating RC structures in seismic areas at territorial scale, in line with current national and international efforts that aim at making European cities smarter. The planned scientific activities will contribute significantly to improve the current state-of-art, and an appraisal of the potential applications can be gained by observing that a total of 1311 projects in Italy were concerned or are dealing with the implementation of smart cities. Overall, it is expected that the present proposal can have positive social, financial/economic, scientific and technological impacts.
The main expected positive social impact is related to the safety and resilience of the communities because aging and deterioration of the existing bridges in Italy is a serious concern. In order to figure out the national relevance of this problem, it is opportune to recall that 24% of the existing bridges was built before than 1961 whereas 28% of the existing bridges was built between 1961 and 1980. Within this framework, smart technologies and decision support tools for the assessment of deteriorating RC structures in seismic areas at territorial scale can enable the implementation of sustainable actions for enhancing safety and resilience of the cities as well as the prompt response to a catastrophic event (such as an earthquake). This, however, requires innovative researches to allow the large-scale use of intelligent sensors for bridge monitoring, as well as the development of new strategies for employing collected data into novel tools for reliability assessment of deteriorating structures at territorial scale.
The present project is also expected to have indirect financial/economic positive impacts. This is because the major motivation behind the implementation of smart cities is financial, as many cities today have been constrained to reducing their budgets. Making the cities smarter through the deployment of intelligent sensing systems and decision support tools help save money and resources because the required actions can be properly optimized and carried out by prioritizing the true needs of the infrastructures. That's why, nowadays, several policies in Europe and worldwide strive to make the cities smarter. This, in turn, is attracting more and more investments and opening new market opportunities. In order to figure out the financial and economic dimension of this project, it is worth recalling a recent Arup' study in which it has been estimated that the global market for smart cities will be $400 billion per annum by 2020.
Research and innovation activities presented in this project are an attempt to advance new paradigms, technological solutions and methodologies for facilitating the efficient management of deteriorating RC bridges. The project findings can potentially impact on the wireless sensing technologies for smart structures and infrastructures, with focus on energy harvesting systems and surface acoustic wave sensors. Such a technologies are topics of strong current interest worldwide, and successful scientific outcomes would be valuable to industry. In fact, more scientific studies about these technologies can open new market opportunities in the field of civil engineering for interested companies, as compared with mechanical and biomedical engineering, where they are becoming more and more common on the basis of previous successful achievements. The great potential related to scientific advances in vibrational energy harvesting systems can be inferred by observing that the whole market is growing very fast, being projected $268.6m-$974.4m [2015-2022] (19.6% growth). Key factors fueling the growth of this market include: growing demand for safe, power-efficient, durable systems that require minimum or no maintenance; extensive implementation of IoT in automation and energy harvesting technology in constructions; increasing trend of green energy and favorable initiatives by governments; rising adoption of wireless sensor networks equipped with energy harvesting system. On the other hand, the potential impacts related to scientific advances in surface acoustic sensors can be deduced by noting that the market was valued at USD 707.94 million in 2019 and is expected to reach USD 1750.19 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 14% over the forecast period 2020 - 2025. The key factor fueling the growth of this market is attributable to the fact that the use of acoustic sensors for acoustic-wave-based MEMS devices has created a promising technology platform for a wide range of applications, with high sensitivity and capable of wireless operations.