The Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) said on Aug. 5 that they selected Lee Jong-han, a professor in Inha University's Department of Civil Infrastructure Engineering, as the winner of the Korea Scientist and Engineer Award for August.
The Korea Scientist and Engineer Award selects one researcher each month who has produced original research results in the past three years and confers the deputy prime minister's award and 10 million won in prize money.
Professor Lee was recognized for developing the "LIVE Digital Twin" technology, which analyzes the conditions of aging social infrastructure and the process of damage propagation and predicts future performance degradation.
The conventional facility management approach focused on analyzing individual damage or conducting inspections after accidents, which made it difficult to reflect real-world environments where freeze-thaw, carbonation, chloride attack, vehicle loads, and other factors act in combination.
Lee's team established an analysis method that links material deterioration, member damage, and structural behavior to predict the locations where damage occurs and the paths along which it spreads. They also built a bidirectional system that automatically converts BIM, a three-dimensional information model at the design stage, into an FEM model for structural analysis and feeds the analysis results back into the virtual environment.
As a result, it enables integrated management of a facility's past and present conditions and future change potential from spatial and temporal perspectives. The technology can be applied not only to bridges but also to other infrastructure such as tunnels and ports. The research results were published in an international journal last year, and related patent applications and software registration have been completed.
Lee said, "It is meaningful to shift maintenance from after-the-fact inspections to a prediction-based, preemptive system," adding, "We will expand the scope of application to a variety of infrastructure."