Innovate UK. Developing a satellite-structural health monitoring system.

THINKLab - Innovate UK

Owners of large assets such as nuclear plants and transport infrastructure require reliable, long-term monitoring and assessment of their asset’s performance and condition. This allows them to schedule maintenance in a timely fashion and make sure the asset is safe and productive for as long as possible.

Traditional methods of surveying are expensive, time consuming and only provide a snapshot of the asset’s condition on a specific date and time.

The application of structural health monitoring techniques provide increased accuracy over existing survey methods by using a variety of in-situ sensing techniques such as accelerometers, strain gauges and displacement sensors to assess the health of the asset.

This project involved the development of the tools necessary to allow a satellite- structural health monitoring product and service to be offered. Satellite remote sensing makes sense when looking at large infrastructure assets because it takes advantage of a technology called InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar). This is a technique for mapping deformation of the Earth’s surface using radar satellite images and it can be used to detect millimeter-scale displacement of physical structures.

Since satellites can image many thousands of square kilometers in one pass, it’s potentially possible to assess the structural health of a multitude of assets in a single pass. This would result in a lower cost per asset as well as access to assets that are not frequently assessed.