– On a humid morning in July, a 60-year-old concrete overpass on I-35 did something no one expected: it whispered.
"We want infrastructure to have a voice," says Varma, leaning over a holographic projection of the Pennybacker Bridge. "We just need to be brave enough to listen."
Not with sound, but with data. A hairline fracture, invisible to the human eye, had expanded by 0.4 millimeters during a heatwave. Within 30 seconds, an AI model at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences flagged the anomaly, sent a text alert to TxDOT, and calculated the exact tonnage of weight the joint could still bear.
Published in the style of MaxQ Magazine | Fall 2024 Issue
– On a humid morning in July, a 60-year-old concrete overpass on I-35 did something no one expected: it whispered.
"We want infrastructure to have a voice," says Varma, leaning over a holographic projection of the Pennybacker Bridge. "We just need to be brave enough to listen."
Not with sound, but with data. A hairline fracture, invisible to the human eye, had expanded by 0.4 millimeters during a heatwave. Within 30 seconds, an AI model at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences flagged the anomaly, sent a text alert to TxDOT, and calculated the exact tonnage of weight the joint could still bear.
Published in the style of MaxQ Magazine | Fall 2024 Issue