UFTI Affiliate Works With Sensors to Ensure the Safety of Infrastructure, Especially Bridges

Dr. Jennifer Rice, is an assistant professor who specializes in infrastructure monitoring and works on bridge research. Rice is part of the Structural Engineering group in the UF Department of Civil & Coastal Engineering. She is also a member of the UFTI’s Internal Steering Committee. Specifically, her research focuses on the development and application of innovative sensors and networks that collect data to improve the management and maintenance of bridges and other infrastructure.

“Although my focus is on bridges, which are critical components of transportation systems, the sensors and tools I develop can be used in other areas of transportation research and applications for enhanced decision support,” Rice said.

One of Rice’s major accomplishments involved developing and installing smart sensor hardware, including the software framework, on the Jindo Bridge in South Korea in 2009. This was the largest wireless smart sensor network deployment on a bridge, which eventually resulted in a structural monitoring applications patent for this device (high sensitivity environmental sensor board and methods for structural health monitoring”, US Serial No. 13/696,747).  And, early this year, Rice was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award titled “Loading on Coastal Bridges in Windstorms using Rapidly Deployable Sensor Network”. This project involves the use of wireless, smart sensor networks to find out how bridges behave during extreme weather events such as severe storm surges or a hurricanes. It is expected that this research will improve decisions related to the assessment and management of bridge health and also develop reliability models from the analysis of data related to hurricane load and response.

For Rice, her affiliation with the UFTI enables collaboration with other researchers and transportation stakeholders, and without cross-disciplinary collaboration, she says that her research would not be possible.

“I am a structural engineer by training, but I draw upon electrical engineering, computer science, and coastal engineering to design sensors and systems for infrastructure monitoring,” she said. “The most interesting research and greatest technological advances happen at the intersections of various disciplines.”

As new transportation infrastructure monitoring technologies such as the gathering of huge amounts of data are adopted, surely there will be a need to develop methodologies and approaches to make sense of what the data is showing. “This challenge will take experts in infrastructure behavior, infrastructure materials, transportation engineers and computer scientists,” Rice said. “UFTI affiliates bring the necessary experience and expertise to address the issue of translating data into action.”

For more information, contact:
Jennifer Rice, Ph.D. Assistant Professor
Department of Civil & Coastal Engineering
Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure & Environment
Email:  jrice@ce.ufl.edu