July 2008 Archives

It's been a year since the nation's attention was dramatically drawn to the health of America's ailing infrastructure. The event, which killed 13 people and injured 145 others, served as a stark reminder that the nation's infrastructure is aging. It also was a dramatic example of the type of disaster researchers at Missouri S&T are working to prevent.

Long before the collapse occurred, Missouri S&T researchers were busy developing new materials and testing methods to preserve and protect the nation’s roads, bridges and buildings.

As one of only 10 national university transportation centers in the United States, Missouri S&T’s Center for Transportation and Infrastructure Safety is bringing together researchers from a variety of disciplines to address some of the nation’s most pressing transportation issues.

As a result of their research, we may one day find ourselves driving across bridges made from soybeans and reinforced with glass, carbon or steel fibers. While we travel across these cutting-edge structures, sensors will monitor the impact of our vehicles and warn technicians at the first signs of trouble.

Nearly 30 percent of the country’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, according to a 2006 report from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Developments at Missouri S&T in alternative building materials and methods of monitoring the structural “health” of roads and bridges could be the keys to safer and stronger transportation systems. In addition, faculty members are training today’s students for a world in which these new approaches to bridge- and road-building will become commonplace.

“We want to educate the next generation of transportation engineers,” says John Myers, associate professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering and director of Missouri S&T’s transportation center.

Myers and his colleagues are creating and testing alternatives to traditional building materials like steel and concrete. Polymers reinforced with carbon, glass and steel fibers already have been tested on 26 bridges in Missouri and surrounding states. A polymer made from soybeans is even being developed, and K. Chandrashekhara, Curators’ Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of Missouri S&T’s Composite Manufacturing Laboratory, said the material could be used to build bridge decks that are strong, corrosive-resistant and environmentally friendly.

Many of the bridges where new materials are tested are also being monitored by devices invented by Missouri S&T faculty. One such device is a sensor developed by Genda Chen, professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering. The sensor can provide a three-dimensional model of cracks in a structure, as well as information about where and when the crack occurred.

Another device developed at Missouri S&T, called a Flood Frog, is being used to test bridges for health indicators such as strain, humidity, water level and vibration. The “frog” is an inexpensive, battery-powered device inside a waterproof case. It can easily be fixed to the outside of a structure.

“The Flood Frog can measure pretty much any quantity,” says its developer Sahra Sedigh, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. By exposing a bridge’s weaknesses in their early stages, “it opens a lot more doors to securing bridges than any other technology around.”

Although it might seem like something straight out of science fiction, Missouri S&T researchers have even invented an inspection method that uses microwaves to see through sheets of reinforced polymer.

When researchers aren’t working in the field, they can still conduct large-scale tests at Missouri S&T’s high-bay lab, where it’s possible to simulate the stress an earthquake puts on a bridge. Much of the testing is part of a larger project for the Network of Earthquake and Engineering Simulation.

“We are unique because we are one of only about 10 schools in the nation that can take the entire body of a bridge and test it,” says Abdeldjelil Belarbi, Curators’ Teaching Professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering. “We are trying to duplicate exactly what happens to a bridge in the real world.”

Belarbi and his colleagues hope their work will lead to the development of a new design code for transportation infrastructure that will aid engineers in building bridges with life spans of up to 100 years.

For this long summer overseas study program in Taiwan, the “nanobiotechnology” team took a break to visit Kenting National Park and nearby National Pingtung University of Science and Technology. Kenting National Park is located in the southernmost tip of Taiwan. With a mean temperature of 23oC and an annual rainfall of 2,200 mm, the park enjoys a tropical climate of long summers and mild winters. The wet season is from May to October and the dry season from October to April. The northeast monsoon, also known as "fallen-wind", prevails every year from October through March. Due to its unique climate and various landforms, Kenting National Park is able to support a rich variety of botanic life. One of its many unique features is the most diversified ecosystems of coral reefs in the world, with many kinds of tropical vegetations. The only problem is that the government built a nuclear power plant near the park and the discharge of warmer water into the sea has resulted in bleaching coral reef extensively. This is a classical struggle for people living in a small but populated island – sustainability vs. human livelihood.

Normally we don't like to divert readers' attention from this blog. But the North American Solar Challenge -- a 2,400-mile odyssey from Plano, Texas, to Calgary -- is about to begin, and we want you to follow along and cheer on this dedicated group of Missouri S&T students.

Missouri S&T's entry, Solar Miner VI, qualified for the third position. That means the team will leave Plano at 9:02 a.m. Sunday, July 13, behind the universities of Michigan and Minnesota. All three schools have won the challenge before -- S&T's last trip to the winner's circle being 2003.

You can follow the action on two different blogs: Experience This! (the student design center blog, where Bob Phelan will post updates and photos) and the Solar Miner VI blog, where two communications staffers -- Visions blogger Lance Feyh and video guy Tom Shipley -- will post the latest words and moving pictures from the road. You can also chart the team's progress throughout the race at Solar42.mst.edu.

Using Google mapping tools and their exceptional modeling skills, seven Missouri S&T students put the campus on the map -- on Google Maps, specifically. And in the process, their creation was one of nine winners in Google's 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition.

As our official news release explains:

Each team used Google SketchUp modeling software to create models of campus buildings, then referenced them in Google Earth – a utility that uses satellite imagery and allows web users to “fly” in to anywhere on the planet. The teams then uploaded their creations to the Google 3D Warehouse. The winners were selected by a panel of industry experts.

For their efforts, they each will receive some pretty cool swag: an Apple iPod Touch, a Nintendo Wii Console, and a Google T-shirt and hat.

The judges praised each winning team for the way they "captured the right level of detail to efficiently reflect the character and complexity of the campuses they represented," "used good judgment about what to detail so that interesting aspects of the buildings were captured," and for their "overall consistency to all the models on each campus." The judges also noted: "The photo-texturing was exceptional – people, cars and vegetation were removed so that the building textures were plainly visible."

Great work, team! You really know how to put Missouri S&T on the map.

The student branch of IEEE-AESS will compete in a UAV competition Sept. 23-25 in Kingaroy, Queensland Australia.

My research in Taiwan is becoming beyond entertaining! However, it wasn’t always so. For about two and a half weeks I have been overloaded with several experiments all at once—trying to find a suitable bacterial strain for protein expression, electrophoresis, etc. Usually, I’m in the lab from 8 a.m. to 6 or 7:30 p.m. and then go out for an amazing Chinese meal with my newfound lab friends!

As world leaders discuss ways to deal with the prospect of massive food shortages in the future, an unlikely ally may be emerging from the world of product development.

Missouri S&T graduate student Parthiv Shah and his advisor -- Elizabeth Cudney, assistant professor of engineering management and systems engineering -- have borrowed a statistical method used by manufacturers to improve product quality to try to determine agricultural yields. Their approach, using a method developed by Genichi Taguchi, a pioneer in the quality improvement field, has proven amazingly accurate at predicting agricultural output. The two researchers believe the method could be used by global relief agencies and governments to help predict food shortages or famines.

Employing a method called the Mahalanobis-Taguchi System, Shah and Cudney evaluated two years’ worth of agricultural yields from a dozen industrialized nations to predict the output for a third year. The results of their research were accurate to within 95 percent of the actual yields for the third year.

Working with 2001 and 2002 data on the yield of 12 types of agricultural products – including grains, wheat, meat and dairy products, and fruits and vegetables – the researchers then compared their results with the actual 2003 yields for those 12 nations. “Using just two years of data, we are able to get fairly accurate predictions with this method,” says Cudney in a Missouri S&T news release.

Food shortages have been the subject of recent discussions of global planners, as conferences in Rome and Paris in early June called for more research on long-term agricultural sustainability. The meetings followed a May 29, 2008, report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, based in Paris, that suggested policymakers reconsider biotech or genetically modified crops to improve crop yields.