| A Winnipeg electronics company
has designed and manufactured a durable, street-ready system that
civil engineers can use to monitor the health of bridges, buildings
and other structures.
University researchers are whizzes at making instruments work in the
lab. However, they'll be the first to admit that making that same
instrument work in the "real world" is often beyond their
capabilities.
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NCE takes bite out of risk
David Fletcher admits commercializing research is
risky, which is why the Networks of Centres of Excellence
program is so critical. The Vice President of IDERS
Inc. says working with ISIS Canada made it feasible
for his company to develop a new structural health monitoring
system.
"When we took this project on there certainly
were risky elements, and that's where Doug (Thomson)
and his group at the university knocked the sharp edges
off the research."
In addition to introducing IDERS to the bourgeoning
field of structural health monitoring, ISIS also worked
with the company to test and validate the technology.
"Now that we're off on our own trying to market
the results of this technology, we're finding that having
worked with ISIS and having their stamp of approval
is opening doors for us. Because ISIS is so well renowned
internationally, it brings credibility to our technology.
We would never have been able to do this on our own."
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Such was the challenge for a team of ISIS Canada researchers who needed
to replace a bulky computer monitoring system with a commercial product
that can "see" inside structures and provide feedback on
how ISIS-designed materials and components are functioning. The technology
will help civil engineers to study structural behaviour in bridges
and other civil engineering infrastructure. ISIS researchers
found their solution in IDERS Inc., a small Winnipeg engineering
company that designed the first debit card terminals for CIBC. The
goal this time was to assemble advanced electronics, opto-photonics,
semiconductor lasers and other sophisticated features into an easy-to-use
interrogation unit. This high-tech box reads information from "smart"
sensors and charts it on a graph to show a structure's stress levels.
Data can be viewed in real-time online at: (link?)
"We're talking about very sensitive electronics that have
to survive in severe environment for decades," says David Fletcher,
Vice President of IDERS. "ISIS researchers saw a role for us
to take this from the development phase right through to the finish
line."
With additional financial assistance from the Industrial Research
Assistance Program, IDERS delivered the first five commercial systems
to ISIS this summer. They will be used on structures embedded with
fibre Bragg grating (FBG) optical sensors utilized by ISIS.
ISIS university researchers, working with a team of 20 IDERS engineers,
scientists and technicians, developed the interrogation unit, which
takes over 100 readings a second rather than the one per second
ISIS was working with in the lab. It can be unplugged and moved
to wherever it is needed, or permanently installed at a site.
"IDERS has developed something that is rugged enough to put
in the back of a pick up truck and used in the field," says
Dr. Douglas Thomson, an ISIS researcher who began working on the
project with IDERS in 2001. "It also has enough communications
horsepower that it could be installed permanently at a site like
the Confederation Bridge, transmitting the FOS data back on a continuous
basis."
Structural health monitoring systems are injecting a wealth of
new information, new life and ideas into the design of urban structures
and into the management and restoration of Canada's aging bridges
and buildings.
In addition to being first off the mark with a Canadian commercial
FBG system, meeting ISIS' Civionics specifications, IDERS
has developed a product that has more features and at a lower price
than what competitors are developing. The 10-kilogram grey boxes
cost $25,000 to $100,000, depending on the application.
Formed in 1991, IDERS employs about 30 people, mostly University
of Manitoba engineering graduates. Just this year, it moved into
the university's new Smartpark, a 30,000 square-foot building
located on the campus.
For ISIS, the system represents a major step toward commercializing
a sensing technology that its researchers have been working on for
years.
"It's very rewarding as a researcher to see technology from
a university taken up by the private sector," says Dr. Thomson,
a professor in the Electrical & Civil Engineering Department
of the University of Manitoba. "I can't imagine that this technology
would have been commercialized without the NCE. Their flexibility
and goal-oriented approach really helps to facilitate these types
of partnerships with the private sector."
Real-time readings from some of the structures ISIS monitors are
available on the research network's Web site: www.isiscanada.com/lowres.htm.
www.isiscanada.com
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