Brick is no dummy
   Published Online Jun 23, 2003
   By GREG KLINE
   News-Gazette Staff Writer

    Don't talk about being dumb as a rock in front of this brick.
    The "smart" brick developed by University of Illinois researchers can tell you its temperature and whether it's leaning or vibrating, among other things. In the future, it also may report on its humidity level, and on the chemicals it senses in its environment.
    The brick sends data wirelessly to a computer 100 feet away, where someone monitoring the information might access it from anywhere by dialing in over a phone line or using a computer network like the Internet.
    Several of the bricks embedded at various locations in a building can act as a kind of network themselves, working together to provide a picture of the overall state of a structure.
    UI electrical and computer engineering Professor Chang Liu, who works a lot in the area of integrated computer chips for sensing applications, said he and colleagues were motivated by the collapse of the World Trade Center.
    "Had the firefighters known a little more about the vibrations and temperatures, that could have changed their tactics," said Liu, a researcher in the UI's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology.
    Liu and graduate student Jonathan Engel foresee a time when buildings, which have remained relatively dumb amid the growth of smart electronics technology, become positively educational. Likewise with facilities such as bridges and roads.
    Firefighters could pull up to a blaze and take a reading of a building's structural integrity before entering it.
    Engineers might use the capabilities after an earthquake that may have left a structure unstable in ways not necessarily visible from the outside.
    Building managers could determine where maintenance work is needed and in what priority.
    A homeowner might tailor heating and air conditioning throughout a house for maximum energy efficiency based on the data from smart bricks and other smart structural elements.
    Liu said the UI researchers created a prototype smart brick because it was an easy model with which to work. But he said the sensing and signaling technology could just as well be built into concrete blocks or incorporated into beams and reinforcing bar, for example.
    The researchers are working on sensors built on a base of flexible, plasticlike polymer materials - rather than the hard silicon of computer chips - to create a "smart skin" that might be wrapped around structural elements like reinforcing bar.
    Engel cast the proof-of-concept brick from concrete. Colored a brownish red, it looks like, well, a brick on five sides.
    "A construction worker can handle this just like a regular brick," Liu said.
    The difference is a compartment cast into what would be the back when the brick is in place.
    The space holds the mostly off-the-shelf electronics that do the sensing and communications work.
    Liu said the project, funded by the National Science Foundation, benefited from new low-power wireless technology, which eliminates the need to string wires from the brick in order to get information out of it.
    The big task for the UI researchers has been getting the electronic components to work together and developing a system to process the signals to make them useful.
    The package is about the size of a deck of cards, but Engel said it could be shrunk, for the most part, into a 1-inch cube with existing technology.
    "We made it this size basically for ease of assembly," he said. "We had to do all this by hand."
    Ultimately, the goal is to put everything on one chip and to put that chip on plastic so it's cheap and resilient.
    For power, the prototype uses the kind of long-lasting battery computers use to retain startup information when powered off. Eventually, the sensor array might be powered almost indefinitely by an inductive coil system, like that in an electric toothbrush, or by solar cells, Liu said.
    He said the UI researchers are working now on making the hardware more robust and standardizing it, which the construction industry will demand.
    They're also continuing development of the software to process the signals and to interpret data from a multi-brick network.
    They hope to see the bricks being used in buildings on a test basis within six months.
   
   You can reach Greg Kline at (217) 351-5215 or via e-mail at kline@news-gazette.com.