The black box is no longer limited to means of transportation: in fact, SHBox™ is the first “infrastructure black box.” It is a system that makes it possible to check the “health status” of any artifact or construction, such as simple buildings, reaching infrastructure such as bridges or railways.
by Giulia Porzionato
In fact, SHBox™ measures any oscillation, change in structure or subsidence of buildings in real time through the use of wireless structural sensors. Such an invention can prove crucial in monitoring tunnels and bridges whose structures are subject to failure due to aging structures. Thus, the construction business increasingly feels the need to monitor the safety of structures, preventing collapses and failures as much as possible; and technology comes to its aid. The invention responds to a specific problem, also known due to recent news reports; in fact, in Italy more than 22 percent of buildings and more than 1,500 kilometers of roads and railways suffer from a bad – sometimes very bad – state of preservation, becoming a potential source of risk for travelers.
SHBox™ came to life within Sysdev Srl, an Italian company founded in 2015 within I3P, an incubator of the Politecnico di Torino. This small, innovative black box is based on the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Its monitoring is possible thanks to the presence within it of the aforementioned wireless structural sensors, network infrastructure for data collection, called gateways, and a cloud platform to process and store data for a period of time longer than a decade.
SHBox™ sensors can be used in large numbers, and are characterized by low cost, small size, and ease of installation. In addition, their power consumption is minimal. In addition to sensing oscillations and vibrations of structures in real time, as mentioned above, they are capable of reporting abnormalities and critical issues thanks to long-range transmitters. The cloud becomes crucial: sensor data can be aggregated immediately and can give rise to the digital twin, the digital image of the actual environment being monitored, also allowing the desired parameters to be chosen for analysis.
According to Marco Bonvino, CEO of Sysdev: “With Sysdev’s SHBox™ technology, it is possible to assess the integrity of a structure even remotely, in real time and with great resolution, thanks to the number of sensors used, without the need for mathematical models of the structure, which are expensive or impossible to process. In addition, with the graphical visualization of the sensors on a navigable 3D model of the structure, one can have an overall and immediate view of the structural health status. This also makes it possible to work to improve artificial terrain resilience, that is, the ability of an area to become functional again after a catastrophic event.”