Upcoming Levee Project

Location: New Orleans, LA, USA

Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Geocomp Corporation, NIST TIP Project

Description:The planned framework of this project includes comprehensive multi-scale monitoring and analysis for real-time health assessment of this infrastructure. This framework relies on long-term continuous monitoring techniques that are minimally-intrusive and inexpensive, and includes satellite-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) measurements and a new shape-acceleration-pore pressure (SAPP) array, developed by Measurand Inc, able to measure soil displacements and accelerations over local areas for tens of meters. High resolution GPS sensors with millimeter level accuracy tie the local SAPP arrays to the InSAR measurement system. The planned system would provide a long term, continuous assessment of the health of levee systems on both local and global scales, allowing federal, state and local governments to prioritize repairs and rehabilitation efforts, and assess the effectiveness of those efforts before a serious failure. The new health assessment framework will be implemented and benchmarked through an ambitious field test in the New Orleans area. The benchmark plan will include a full-scale test of a levee that will be loaded until failure (i.e., a levee breach). This test will be conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Fig. 1: Schematic illustration of the multi-scale monitoring of flood-control levees; InSAR reflectors and permanent scatterers for global monitoring, SAA-pore pressure arrays for local monitoring, and GPS sensors. SAAs were one of the very few instruments that survived the collapse.

Website: http://www.nist-rpi.org/

Dikes/Levees II