SBIR Phase I: Prototyping Internet of Things (IoT) Sensing Platform for Infrastructure Monitoring

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Phase I project to enable the efficient collection, organization, maintenance, and analysis of a significant volume of reliable scientific data regarding the strength of varieties of concrete mixes from across the country and the world. It is envisions that such technology may improve the quality and safety of critical civil infrastructure, accelerate construction schedules, help optimize the performance and efficiency of construction contractors and engineers, and reduce environmental costs associated with excess cement usage.

With the approval of the 2021 Infrastructure Bill, the U.S. will make the single largest investment in repairing and reconstructing the nation’s bridges and major roadways since the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s. Current concrete strength test methods are cumbersome, costly, timeinefficient, prone to error and environmentally unfriendly.

Development and commercialization of a reliable, cost-effective, user-friendly Internet of Things (IoT)-based electromechanical impedance sensing system that directly measures, in real-time, in-place concrete strength without reliance on the destructive testing of concrete samples has the potential to improve the civil infrastructure industry by providing reliable data analytics.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is aimed at determining the strength of in-place concrete, in real time, using a piezoelectric sensor and electromechanical impedance (EMI) analysis. Destructive compressive strength testing (American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM C39) and maturity testing (ASTM C1074)) are the two primary methods used to determine strength development of concrete; however, both methods rely upon the creation and destruction of concrete samples which is inefficient and unreliable as well as harmful to the environment (both due to the concrete waste caused by sampling and the excess cement usage driven by the tendency of concrete samples to show low strength).

The proposed research will test a variety of concrete mixes for strength over various time points. The proposed technology requires no concrete sampling or destruction, compared to both destructive compressive strength testing and maturity testing. Successful completion of this program may result in development of a prototype of a piezoelectric concrete strength sensor and customized datalogger capable of automatic data acquisition, processing, and transmission and a customized database to directly communicate in-place concrete strength data to contractors via a secured cloud server and highly intuitive graphical user interface.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.