Son Hoon (손훈), a KAIST professor who developed sensor expertise that may detect the motion of medium and small social infrastructure services in actual time, has been chosen as this month’s winner of South Korea’s Science and Technology Award.
The Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation mentioned on Tuesday they chose Son, a professor in KAIST’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, because the June winner of the award.
Son was acknowledged for contributing to strengthening security within the nation’s building infrastructure by creating an inexpensive, high-precision displacement sensor expertise for real-time catastrophe warnings for medium and small social infrastructure services.
As social infrastructure equivalent to bridges and buildings ages, the significance of structural well being monitoring is rising. Medium and small buildings, which account for greater than 98 p.c of services worldwide, require exact remark as a result of their displacement is as small because the millimeter stage. Existing tools prices not less than 40 million gained, limiting administration, the ministry defined.
Son developed a simultaneous multi-physical measurement expertise that makes use of a single sensor to measure acceleration, tilt and displacement on the identical time. It fuses millimeter-wave radar with a MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical System) accelerometer and applies a signal-processing algorithm. Millimeter-wave radar makes it simple to measure structural displacement that strikes slowly. A MEMS accelerometer has the benefit of capturing quick vibrations properly.
The sensor developed by Son prices lower than 1 million gained, or about one-fortieth of present manufacturing prices, whereas securing each financial viability and accuracy with ultra-high precision of about 0.026 mm. It additionally decreased energy consumption to 131 mWh, about one-hundredth of the earlier stage.
It additionally incorporates energy-harvesting expertise that converts discarded vitality in day by day life into electrical vitality and shops it. The sensor contains edge-computing capabilities, permitting it to guage collapse threat by itself with out further tools and transmit alerts in actual time.
The expertise has been verified for reliability by means of on-site demonstrations at 13 or extra websites at residence and overseas. They embrace a parking construction at Stanford University, an expressway in San Jose, a bridge in Weifang, China, and the Geumgang Pedestrian Bridge in Sejong City.
The achievement is a case wherein foundational expertise developed with help from the ministry’s Basic Research Program, together with Leader Research and Basic Research Lab funding, progressed by means of commercialisation and expertise switch. It was revealed within the worldwide journal Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing in January 2023.
Son mentioned, “This research is meaningful in that it has laid the technological foundation for precisely managing medium and small facilities that were left out of constant observation.” He added, “Going forward, I will continue research on artificial intelligence-based digital twins to lead a paradigm shift in the safety diagnosis market toward automation, unmanned operation and intelligence.”