Hybrid tools for non-destructive evaluation and monitoring of infrastructures: optimized management for their durability – OHMIGOD

Structural health monitoring is a crucial issue for infrastructure managers and owners in different fields such as transport and energy civil engineering and buildings. Around the world, almost 15,000 infrastructures are in a degraded or even critical condition. At present, infrastructure managers rely on experts to determine performance indicators (durability of materials and mechanical characteristics), in order to ascertain the infrastructure’s state of health. The lack of effective predictive methods means that appraisals of the pathologies are carried out too late, leading to high diagnostic and repair costs. The different interviews conducted as part of the service provided by Cerema and Morphosense illustrated the managers’ need to be able to monitor the life cycle of their infrastructures on-site in a precise manner, combining several non-destructive measurands in real time.
At the time of writing, there is no commercialised solution on the market that directly meets the requirements of infrastructure managers. Many partial solutions are available, but they only cover some of the needs. The Cerema public establishment and the Morphosense company have developed cutting edge know-how and technological solutions for on-site non-destructive testing of infrastructures, including real time monitoring. However these solutions taken separately do not at present meet the intrinsic needs of infrastructure managers.
The ambition of the joint laboratory OHMIGOD is to fulfil these needs by implementing a fully-fledged joint research and development project in order to devise a new approach as well as new solutions. By pooling the know-how and technologies of both partners, and combining this with research and development work, it will be possible to go beyond the state of the art. This collaboration will be beneficial for both project partners. The development of new solutions will enable Morphosense to increase its international business thanks to unique tools, and Cerema will be able to enhance its knowledge about new technologies and broaden its vision of the market.
The end purpose of the work carried out in this LabCom is to create a hybrid tool combining the NEURON Technology developed by Morphosense and the magnetic patch and 3D frequency jump radar technologies developed by Cerema’s ENDSUM research team, associated with electromagnetic/mechanical characterisation methods, to produce a highly efficient diagnostic that is less invasive than current tools and does not damage verified areas. This solution produced by the LabCom is highly innovative in the community of research and expertise in civil engineering NDT. This is because of its singularity, which consists in estimating performance indicators by coupling durability indicators originating from both physical and dielectric characterisation of the material (EM waves/material interactions) and from mechanical/vibration characteristics of the structure. In addition, its performance, robustness and financial characteristics will be optimised (relating to initial reinforcement corrosion pathologies) thanks to a cross-disciplinary approach that will combine three different physical sensitivity techniques and make them complementary to each other.
In order to ensure a long-term future for this joint laboratory and to meet market needs, the partners will provide the resources to reproduce this so-called “durability” approach after the first 36 months in other fields, such as energy (wind, dams), buildings and historical monuments, with the definition of new durability indicators.