CEE Seminar: Instrumentation Design for Bridge Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract: There are more than 600,000 bridges in the U.S., and more than 15 percent are considered structurally obsolete or deficient. The majority of bridges are only inspected annually. Adoption of modern structural health monitoring (SHM) has been very slow. From newspaper articles it seems such SHM systems could cost upwards of $200,000. In this seminar, the speakers will share their experience developing real-time, continuous SHM for bridges. In addition, key engineering issues and decisions will be discussed. The lecture will present and contrast approaches based on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and fiberoptic sensors.

Bios: George Lu is a co-founder and CEO at optoXense. Prior to cofounding the company, he was interim CEO and VP of business development at AWID, an RFID reader manufacturer; CEO at CompuWave Technology, an application software developer for mobile POS and logistics; VP at Reveo, a technology incubation firm that developed solid-state fuel cell, optical imaging, optical storage, VR imagine/content and semiconductor packaging. Lu holds three patents, and has a Ph.D in electrical and computer engineering (applied physics) from UC San Diego, a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Irvine, and an MBA from NYU. Joey Costa is a co-founder and CTO at optoXense. Previously, he was director of engineering at several startups, where he led device research and product development in fiberoptic telecommunication and oil field sensors; integrated photonics and planar light wave circuits for high power diode laser output combiners; fiberoptic sensor design and sensing-system development for commercial, aerospace and military applications; and femtojoule-per-bit optical computing systems development. Costa holds six patents in the fiberoptic device-development and sensing-technology fields. He has a master's degree in electrical engineering (applied physics) from UC San Diego, and a B.S. in applied physics and applied mathematics from Caltech.