A team of researchers at the Building Envelope and Technology Access Centre (BETAC) partnered with SMT Research to monitor the structural health of the Skilled Trades and Technology Centre (STTC) being built at Red River College.

Background

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of bridges and heritage buildings are essential to ensure modern rehabilitation techniques and materials continue to perform as expected. SHM systems also play a key role to ensure new buildings perform as expected with respect to energy efficiency and durability.

Our Research

• The BETAC and SMT Research team installed a substantial network of sensors embedded throughout the new STTC.
• A total of seven different building envelope types have been instrumented throughout the exterior building envelope as well as the roof and green roof assemblies.
• The measurements from these sensors can be compared to controlled tests performed on mock-up test walls in the Dual Environment Test Chamber located in the Centre for Applied Research in Sustainable Infrastructure (CARSI) at Red River College.
• Field analysis will be performed in real-time during normal building occupancy throughout the temperature extremes inherent to Winnipeg.

Results

A paper on our work was presented at the 8th International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructure in Brisbane, Australia, in December, 2017.

The paper focused on the application of advanced sensor networks and data visualization techniques on a building instrumented as a ‘living lab’ located in Winnipeg, Canada.