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charon writes:

Civil engineers at Vanderbilt University's Laboratory for Systems Integrity and Reliability (LASIR) are developing a nanoparticle coating which changes its luminosity depending on how much stress it is under. This has a bright potential in creating sensors to determine when sections of infrastructure need reinforcement or replacement.

"Currently, there are two ways to keep everything from bridges to aircraft safe," said LASIR Director, Douglas Adams, Daniel F. Flowers Professor of the civil and environmental engineering. "One is to send people out to look at them with a flashlight. The problem with this is that it is labor-intensive and the people can't see very small cracks when they form. The other is to install elaborate sensor networks that constantly look for small cracks and detect them before they grow too large. The problem is that these networks are very expensive and, in the case of aircraft, add a lot of weight. "So we need to somehow change the materials we are using so they illuminate these tiny cracks."

The team's initial studies, published last April in the Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical and Aerospace Systems, have determined that adding a tiny concentration of special nanoparticles (1 to 5 percent by weight) to an optically clear polymer matrix produces a distinctive light signature that changes as the material is subjected to a broad range of compressive and tensile loads.

[...] In this fashion, the researchers have verified that the material can act as a new kind of strain gauge that permanently records the cumulative amount of stress that the material to which it is applied experiences.

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