AEM Announces ‘Dream Phase’ Winners in Infrastructure Competition
July 8, 2016
Because of its lightweight honeycomb construction, InfinitPipe can easily be moved around without the use of heavy machinery. The 28-ft InfinitPipe Mobile Manufacturing Unit weighs less than 7,000 lbs and is designed to fit inside a truck.
The Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) announced five winners in the “Dream” phase of the Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge, an incentivized competition launched by the trade association to solicit groundbreaking ideas and solutions that address some of the biggest challenges facing United States infrastructure.
Launched in January, the three-phased incentivized competition challenges a community of innovators to think in aspirational and disruptive ways and to reimagine personal mobility, freight movement, and utility infrastructure components and systems in the United States.
Two of the five winners have ties to the sewer and water world:
Team InfinitPipe – InfinitPipe a Breakthrough for Pipeline Industry: InfinitPipe is a breakthrough for the pipeline construction and repair industry to construct joint-less composite pipe onsite.
RELATED: QuakeWrap Innovation Builds Pipe in the Field
Team UAH – One Crack Away from a Disaster: Imagine that every dam and bridge in America has a virtual reality replica and it’s aided by data from sensors and machine learning.
The “Dream” phase of the Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge generated 30 submissions from competitors based in the United States, Canada, Indonesia, the Philippines, Romania, the United Kingdom and Ukraine. Submissions were judged based on the degree to which the proposed solution improved infrastructure capacity, safety, and connectivity, as well as on innovativeness and viability of the solution’s implementation. A five-person panel of expert judges evaluated the submissions. Several winners consist of teams from the University of Alabama at Huntsville, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Auburn University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the George Washington University.
“We are excited about the level of interest and diversity in submissions in the second phase of AEM’s Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge,” said AEM President Dennis Slater. “So far, in just six months alone, we have explored a number of ways to reinvent and prepare for the next generation of U.S. infrastructure. The winning innovators were those who dared to think big and generate ideas that move us away from the pothole discussion and towards bold and innovative solutions.”
The Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge is part of a larger thought-leadership initiative launched by AEM last year that will develop a long-term, national vision for United States infrastructure. To continue to follow the third and final phase of the competition, click here. Winners of the incentivized competition will be featured at the CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2017 trade show’s Tech Experience, in March 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada.