Welcome and MissionVirginia Tech's Smart Infrastructure Laboratory (VT-SIL) mission is to advance research and education in topics that utilize sensor information to improve the design, monitoring and daily operation of civil and mechanical infrastructure as well as to investigate how humans interact with the built environment. The centerpiece of VT-SIL is the full-scale living laboratory in the new, 160,000 square foot Goodwin Hall, which is the most instrumented public building in the world for vibration monitoring of both the building structure as well as human activity in the building. In conjunction with the VT College of Engineering and the support of Dean Richard Benson, VT-SIL is continuously developing and building a living laboratory, where over 140 accelerometer mounts (3 axis per mount capability), along with other sensors, are being mounted throughout the entire 5-story building. As of December 2015, the phase I instrumentation with 225 hard-wired accelerometers is complete and is in its validation stage. Significant amounts of pilot data have already been collected and analyzed in a myriad of research studies. As of late fall 2015 the building instrumentation has become fully and continuously operational collecting data 24/7 and 365 days a year generating interesting challenges from data storage and collection to data mining and building dynamics. Welcome to our website and watch the laboratory come to life with regular construction and research updates!
|
|
The story
If you would like to learn about how this lab came to be and what we are doing today to take Intelligent Infrastructure to the next level see Dr. Tarazaga's TEDx Virginia Tech Talk. Here you will learn on how a small idea has flourished into a game changing endeavor for intelligent infrastructure and how these small sensors are giving the building a heart beat and the ability to communicate and interact with humans. This takes buildings to the era of the "smart" car, "smart" phone, and "smart" watch, but more importantly it shows how we need to rely in a "smart" communities of multi-disciplinary capabilities to make these visions become a reality. You will see how this building is helping us develop the next generation in building energy savings, instant security and threat detection capabilities and even help older adults with their health related problems. Enjoy and hopefully you will be inspired!
|
|
VT-SIL Overview
The Goodwin Hall living laboratory is providing a national and international test bed for cutting-edge research and education for graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 students in the wide breadth of areas related to developing advanced smart and intelligent infrastructure. VT-SIL aims to provide a central location for supporting multidisciplinary research and education goals with VT researchers as well as external collaborators from industry, government, and other academic entities. Our VT-SIL members provide a wide range of expertise consisting of colleges, schools and departments at Virginia Tech ranging from Mechanical, Civil, Electrical, Industrial and Systems Engineering, Computer Science to Geography and anthropology, the School of Education, the School of Visual Arts and School of Performing Arts. Additionally, we have a critical and active research partnership with the VT University Libraries to collaborate with their experts in archiving and utilizing digital data from Big Data sets. This is a crucial partnership as VT-SIL's instrumentation generates ~4GB/hour unto 1GB/min during full building monitoring. This partnership facilitate advances in Smart Storage and Access of digital data to create an easy-to-use test bed. We are also leveraging a collaborative effort with the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT). Our diverse composition enables us to investigate a wide-range of topics in unique, and sometimes unusual ways, in order to create new and novel multidisciplinary education and research opportunities. Some of the VT-SIL research projects underway, or in planning stages, utilize the instrumented Goodwin Hall (GH) for investigating a wide spectrum of topics including sensor logistics and system design, sonification of data, occupancy monitoring for emergency response and evacuation, structural health monitoring, building security, dynamic model validation, vibration testing, and large data management, among many other topics. What would you like to learn from a building that talks to you?
To support the vision of creating a living lab in Goodwin Hall, VT-SIL is working to make a significant amount of the data from the instrumentation open source in order to serve more than just the Virginia Tech community. Additionally, visitors to the building, from young children to established researchers, will have the opportunity to interact with the instrumentation and learn about engineering topics on building design and monitoring. Upon completion of the instrumentation commissioning, Goodwin Hall became the most instrumented public building for vibrations in the world with continuous monitoring from over 200 accelerometers throughout the building. Welcome to our website and watch the laboratory come to life with regular construction and research updates! Please contact us regarding collaborative ideas and opportunities.
|