Nico Längst, M.Sc.

Topic: SHMInfra – Structural Health Monitoring for Critical Infrastructure

Monitoring critical infrastructure—such as railways or pipelines—is a time-consuming and costly process that is no longer in line with the times in the era of digitalization. Innovative structural health monitoring systems continuously monitor critical infrastructure and detect problems in real time or even predictively. In doing so, they enhance safety and prevent the catastrophic consequences of undetected defects. Sound can be fed into the infrastructure using low-cost transmitters and read by receivers. As they travel, the sound waves interact with defects, are reflected and transformed, and thus allow conclusions to be drawn about the condition of the section they have traveled through. In this research project, simulations are used to investigate what types of damage can be detected using guided sound waves. The findings are then tested in collaboration with Siemens.