Thanos Papanicolaou, professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee and TNWRRC Director, traveled to Portland, Oregon for the 2016 National Hydraulic Engineering Conference in August. The conference hosts researchers and engineers from both state and federal Departments of Transportation, as well as from universities and consulting firms across the country.

Papanicolaou, as director of the UTK Hydraulics & Sedimentation Lab, presented his team’s groundbreaking work with Radio Frequency ID tags (RFID). Papanicolaou and his team are using the RFIDs as a new technology (patent pending) that looks for the underwater safety of bridge structures. 

His talk, titled “Scour Monitoring around Hydraulic Structures with RFIDs,” highlighted the results from past work that shows the RFIDs are detectable buried in sediments over 40 ft. deep. The return signal strength received from the RFIDs relates to amount of sediment over top of them. The RFIDs provide a reliable monitoring, inspection, and life estimation tool to measure in real-time the scour around bridge piers. With more than 150,000 bridges across the United States that are vulnerable to scour, this tool is much safer and more cost-effective than current methods. This work will ultimately translate to an inexpensive, automated bridge monitoring system with the potential applications for other critical infrastructure, such as dams, levees, or other near-shore structures.