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A New Brunswick man has a way to weigh vehicles while they drive over bridges to better understand the impact trucks are having on the province’s infrastructure.
“We turn, you know, full-scale highway bridges into giant bathroom scales, basically,” said Ethan MacLeod, who is from Saint John but now lives in Fredericton.
Macleod’s company, Infralytix, recently won the grand prize at the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru Startup Pitch Competition, which included more than 140 entrepreneurs across 80 companies.
He was awarded $100,000 for his work with bridge weigh-in motion technology.
MacLeod said small sensors are placed on the underside of the bridge and, as the truck crosses, it measures how the bridge responds allowing them to calculate how much the truck weighs.
“It’s not just trucks, I mean, we can … weigh all the way down to a motorcycle,” he said.
MacLeod said it’s important information to have in order to extend the lives of these structures, especially as the province’s infrastructure is aging.
MacLeod said he started working on the technology during a summer student position in Fredericton with the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, while he was between his masters and PhD.
He said there is a small rural bridge near Grand Lake and it had a weight restriction of 10 tonnes, but some local residents reported seeing a full-size transport truck on the bridge — around six times heavier than the weight limit.
“Initially, my task was basically to maybe, like, make some sort of system that would send a warning if something funny or unusual happened,” he said.
“But the more I dug into it, I started to think, ‘well, maybe I could just weigh the truck.’ … We weren’t sure if it was going to work, and it ended up working pretty well.
“So that question of, what’s actually on our bridges? How is it actually performing? It really continued on into my PhD where, you know, I moved on to a bigger bridge and really refined the technology.”
CBC News was not granted an interview with the Department of Transportation about whether it planned to use the technology going forward. Instead, the province sent a brief statement saying it was aware of the technology and had “met with its proprietor.”
Information Morning – Saint John8:31Saint Johner takes top prize in New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s pitch competition
A researcher originally from Saint John has developed technology to essentially turn bridges into scales to monitor the weight of trucks using them. Ethan MacLeod’s technology won him a big prize from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation. He tells Emily Brass how he came up with the idea, how the technology works and what’s next.
MacLeod said he has a great relationship with the province and wouldn’t have been able to develop the technology without that support.
“You can’t just go and start sticking things on bridges, someone’s going to get upset,” he said.
With the $100,000 prize, MacLeod plans to take the full-scale pieces of equipment, shrink them down and make it something that’s easy to use — “a turnkey package.”
Moving forward, he said the idea is that the province would have first dibs on the technology.
“I think, you know, New Brunswick is always going to be kind of the headquarters,” he said.
