Department Chair and Professor
University of New Hampshire
Abstract
The Memorial Bridge is a vertical lift bridge carrying vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians across the tidal Piscataqua River between Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Kittery, Maine. The Living Bridge Project, led by the University of New Hampshire, transformed the Memorial Bridge into a self-diagnosing, self-reporting "smart bridge" incorporating tidal energy innovation. Launched in 2014 with National Science Foundation support supplemented by New Hampshire Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration support, the project established this bridge as a living laboratory for researchers, industry, state agencies, and the public.
Bridges are typically noticed only when they fail or must be replaced at great cost. The Living Bridge demonstrates infrastructure that continuously reports on its own condition, traffic, and environment while serving as a testbed for emerging sensing and marine renewable energy technologies. More than 40 sensors capture structural, traffic, and environmental data; structural measurements calibrate a structural model that supports condition assessment and long-term asset management.
Tidal energy is harvested from a floating Turbine Deployment Platform moored to one of the bridge piers. A 3.2 m diameter, 25 kW cross-flow turbine demonstrated grid-connected operation with full performance instrumentation, and a second-generation 2.5m diameter, 26 kW axial-flow turbine, the highly instrumented Open Source Tidal Energy Converter (OSTEC), a collaborative project between UNH, SNL, NLR and PNNL is currently being tested.
The site now anchors key open-water testing infrastructure for the DOE-supported Atlantic Marine Energy Center and makes bridge data and performance metrics accessible to the public and K-12 educators through outreach programming.
About Dr. Erin Bell
Erin Santini Bell, Ph.D., P.E., is Professor and Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of New Hampshire, where she has served on the faculty since 2003 and as Interim Dean of the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences in 2024–25. Her research focuses on structural health monitoring of in-service structures, finite element model updating, and data-driven transportation asset management, and she has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications with over 2,000 citations. She led the Living Bridge Project, which transformed Portsmouth's Memorial Bridge into a smart bridge and national marine energy research testbed. She is the principal investigator for the UNH Technology Transfer Center serving every New Hampshire municipality and the NH Highway Construction Workforce Partnership. She is the UNH associate director of the Atlantic Marine Energy Center