Antoine Bassil

Well, I want to dedicate this quote for young early stage researchers: “Dreams don't work unless you take action. The surest way to make your dreams come true is to live them.”

What I learned following my PhD graduation is that it does not matter whether you stay in academia or go to industry! What is more important is to establish a dream and fix your objectives.

INFRASTAR family introduced me to the world of Bridges, Structural Health Monitoring SHM and Fiber Optics Sensors. These three years were a great experience full of opportunities to engage and initiate in multiple research topics and collaborations. This environment full of freedom and creativity encouraged us to think outside and thus prepared me well for my current position. It helped me build a dream and fix my objectives!

So guess what I am doing now! I am doing what I imagined I would be doing after my PhD!

It has been one year since I started working in Quadric – Artelia Group as an instrumentation and monitoring bridge engineer. What is special about my new work is that I am instrumenting real bridges with Distributed Fiber Optics Sensors DFOS and thus I am contributing to spread my PhD knowledge about this novel technology in the SHM field and I am helping to bring it to the market. All this for a fixed purpose: keeping bridges in France and Europe safe!

Well, here is some of the milestones that I reached this year and some of the projects that I worked on:

Seyssel Bridge: only DFOS can follow cracks in structures reinforced with carbon fiber laminates.
First instrumentation of a stone arch bridge with DFOS.
Ile Barbe Bridge: Oldest bridge still in existence and use today in Lyon (built in 1827).
My first DFOS real time surveillance system: it includes more than 100000 sensing points with 25 measurements per second. A huge data processing effort!
Normandy Bridge: Waiting the green light for a project aiming to develop a DFOS monitoring system for post-tensioning cables in collaboration with my old colleagues in Gustave Eiffel University :-)