Slashdot Mirror
Smart Bricks to Monitor Buildings of the Future
Roland Piquepaille writes "Scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a "smart brick" which can monitor a building's health and report its conditions wirelessly. "This innovation could change the face of the construction industry," said Chang Liu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois. "We are living with more and more smart electronics all around us, but we still live and work in fairly dumb buildings. By making our buildings smarter, we can improve both our comfort and safety." Built into a wall, these bricks could monitor a building's temperature, vibration and movement. Such information could be vital to firefighters battling a blazing skyscraper, or to rescue workers ascertaining the soundness of an earthquake-damaged structure. These researchers also think these devices could help monitoring nurseries, daycares and senior homes. You'll find more details in this summary."
This could be a very expensive and useless technology. The proposal for it and the quote by the professor who apparently invented it are reflective of the brick's function as more of a "black box", as in an airplane, rather than a useful tool. If the brick says the buildings about to fall, what can the owners do? The excuse that it helps firefighters is totally ridiculous, firefighters aren't going to have time to jack in to a network plug when they're trying to save lives. The other touted use it to sense vibrations. I don't know about you, but I know when there's an earthquake and when there's not, I don't need a brick to tell me.
In short, useless waste of money marketing FUD. Per norm for slashdot stories.
Hello.
The problem with technologies like these are that they're simply form factor adjustments of existing technologies.
Currently you can very easily put temperature sensors (or even seismic detectors) in a building, but this project wants to put these items into a brick with a wireless connection. Is this really a story? Sure, such a brick might exist in every new building in the future, but you could have this in your home right now, in a small box containing the same gadgets. Putting it in a brick just doesn't seem that exiting, y'know?
This is like the 'building a PC without a case' stories we see from time to time, but without the humor value of seeing someone mount a motherboard in a cardboard box.
It's called a curtian wall. It's not structrually bearing, but cinder blocks might be the cheapest way to do it. When you put them around a fire escape, they can keep you from cooking as fast.
I'm not sure I want "vibration" sensors in my walls for the local police department, nosy neighbors or anyone else to listen to. My voice is a "vibration" and what I say in my house and place of work is for those around me, not big brother.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If you look at the vibrations coming out of a building that is burning there is a huge jump in the amplitude of certain bands right before the building collapses.. there's basically a shift in the fundamental frequency of the building. A brick to detect this is gonna save alot of firefighters.
Basically, any structure like a bridge or a building can be characterized pretty well by its frequency response. You stimulate it with an impulse and transform the output to the frequency domain. A burning building is being constantly stimulated, so detecting the vibrations with a brick in the wall is going to let you easily determine the frequency response.
As you can imagine (this is a generalization) if there's a large spike in certain frequencies, the structure is unstable. When you engineer structures, you try and keep the frequency response flat.