UM engineer builds bridge sensors to give early warnings

The device that Mehdi Kalantari hopes will revolutionize monitoring of the structural integrity of bridges around the world is about as small and flat as a credit card and is powered by the sun, by ambient light or even by stray radio waves it can pick out of the atmosphere.

An Iranian immigrant and electrical engineer at the University of Maryland, College Park, Kalantari has devised what he calls a lightweight, low-power, wireless sensor that he hopes will detect weaknesses in bridges and other infrastructure before they can turn into calamities such as the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge that killed 13 people in Minneapolis in 2007.

If they work as imagined, the devices would detect anomalies in the structure of even the most inaccessible parts of bridges and send alerts via cellular frequencies to its human masters. Among the things it would measure would be stress loads, vibration, temperature and the creation and growth of cracks.

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