New Bridge Monitoring Sensors

HP's new, bigger MEMS sensor promises thousand-fold sensitivity improvement

Last week, two rods snapped on California's Bay Bridge, raining debris on three vehicles and forcing officials to close the bridge, a major commuter artery, for a week. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories thinks one way to monitor the gradual deterioration of the world's bridges is to pepper them with many thousands of small networked acceleration sensors that could, in theory, provide warnings before catastrophic failure.

HP Labs announced today a technological breakthrough that will become a key part of that vision: new inertial sensing technology that will make digital microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers up to 1000 times as sensitive as what's currently available. The sensor is based on HP's MEMS technology, which was first commercialized in the company's inkjet printer cartridges.

IEEE Spectrum