Grant: Alliance Grants

Failure of some structural assets such as the pipeline structures in oil and gas or power generation industries can be extremely expensive, hazardous, and dangerous to the environment. It is highly desired to have an accurate and reliable maintenance plan to avoid the failure. The goal of this project is to develop a diagnostic sensor for on-line smart measurements in various health monitoring- related parameters of a working structure, particularly the pipelines in oil and gas or power generation industries. This sensor is referred as Structural Smart Sensors (3S) here due to their capabilities in (i) producing high quality information from a significant volume of their collected raw data, (ii) communicating to other machines and in an Internet of Things (IoT) platform, (iii) adjusting their inspection frequency, transmission scheduling, and processing parameters, smartly using the information they produce themselves. 3S can be used directly in a LIVE Digital Twin (DT) platform with the characteristics described in this proposal. 3S specifically collects the vibrational data of the structural system, processes the data to produce the information regarding the health of the system, and determines the failure probabilities according to the predefined models in the LIVE digital twin system. It is highly beneficial for DT applications when a myriad number of sensors need to collect high volume of raw data which are almost impossible to be transmitted dynamically over the years of service. The described smart sensor is a cyber-physical micro-system with a combination of physical sensing mechanism and cyber component to process the collected data based on the validated predefined models. It dynamically completes on-site processing using the abstract simulation formula and produces high quality data which results in low processing cost in term of computational time and transmission frequency. Considering the requirements of the 4th industrial revolution and the significant needs of industries to move toward digitalization, and intelligence of machines, 3S will be vitally needed in a very near future and having this technology available in Canada will increase Canada's competency in the international markets.