Novel Concrete Bridge Spatially Distributed Monitoring Through Chromatic Liquid Crystal Elastomers (BriCE)

BriCE explores CLCE smart coating that change color to reveal cracks in bridges, offering safer, cheaper, and more sustainable infrastructure monitoring.

The project at a glance

Start date:

01 Jul 2025
Duration in months:

48
Funding:

2024 Audacity Grant
Principal Investigator(s):

Numa Joy BERTOLA

Jan LAGERWALL

About

The world’s infrastructure is facing critical safety and longevity issues, with more than 30% of bridges in the EU over 50 years old. Despite this, the adoption of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) technologies is still limited due to high costs, complex installations, and sometimes limited reliability. This has led to both tragic failures, such as the Morandi Bridge collapse in Genoa (2018), and costly premature replacements. Existing sensor-based monitoring technologies remain limited: they typically measure at discrete points, meaning cracks developing a few centimeters away can go unnoticed. As cracks in concrete are highly localized and often precede catastrophic failure, there is an urgent need for reliable, continuous, and spatially distributed monitoring solutions. The BriCE project addresses this challenge by exploring the use of Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Elastomers (CLCEs) as a novel sensing material for concrete bridges. CLCEs are mechanochromic polymers that change color in response to strain. When applied as coatings on bridge surfaces, they act as large-area, two-dimensional sensors: any crack formation or propagation becomes visible through local color shifts. Unlike traditional electronic devices, CLCE coatings require no power supply, are inexpensive to apply, and can cover wide surfaces, making them highly scalable. To transform this material innovation into a practical monitoring solution, BriCE is a multi-disciplinary project that combines CLCE coatings with a camera-based tracking system and machine learning algorithms. This integration enables continuous detection, the quantification of crack development, and the resulting datasets on crack patterns will allow for the first data-driven models of structural behavior, significantly improving the accuracy of safety assessments. By demonstrating this system on a full-scale bridge, BriCE aims to validate a low-cost, durable, and revolutionary monitoring approach. The project’s ambition is to trigger a paradigm shift in infrastructure management: towards safer, more sustainable, and more economical decision-making for bridge maintenance worldwide.