Thomas Schumacher on the scaffolding in front of the Chevron, an assembly of blocks located above the original entrance to the Pyramid of Khufu.
Less than 10% of the Egyptian Pyramids in Giza have been charted, but new technological advances and innovative thinkers are looking to change that. Maseeh College’s Civil Engineering Professor Thomas Schumacher’s ongoing work with the ScanPyramids project in Egypt is part of that effort and was detailed in a recently released journal article. It has been capturing the attention of the world’s media outlets since. ScanPyramids is a tour de force in global cooperation–supervised by the Supreme Council of the Antiquities of Egypt, coordinated by Professor Hany Helal from Cairo University, Egypt, and the Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute, Paris, France, it includes academic and corporate partners from Egypt, France, Japan, Germany, and Canada.
Schumacher’s work in Egypt aligns with his overarching ambition to develop practical non-destructive evaluation (NDE) tools to preserve our civil infrastructure. The proverbial ball got rolling with a minor seed grant Schumacher won in 2018, in a joint proposal with his colleagues Dr. Eric Wan, an Electrical Engineering Professor at the Maseeh College and Professor Xubo Song at OHSU, who runs a Lab for Machine Learning and Biomedical Image Computing (MLBIC). The proposal explored how medical imaging might have applications in examining concrete structures, and with the grant money, they developed unique algorithms and protocols to fuse ground penetrating radar (GPR) and ultrasonic testing (UST)-based images of concrete.
Schumacher’s long-term mentor Professor Christian Große from the Technical University of Munich, Germany invited him in 2021 to utilize these new advances in exploring and mapping the Pyramids in Giza with the international ScanPyramids project, which began in 2015. Working on this project came with some challenges, as this UNESCO-protected icon required security clearance and any measurements needed to be “non-destructive” in the most absolute sense. Schumacher has visited the Pyramids in Giza twice, once in February and again in October of 2022, to help with ultrasonic measurements and then perform image fusion of GPR and UST measurements. This new approach yielded dividends when a sealed-off corridor, measuring roughly 7 by 8 feet and 30 feet long, was confirmed behind the Chevron blocks located above the original entrance on the northern side of the Pyramid of Khufu. An anomaly had been predicted in this region earlier by a French-Japanese-Egyptian research team using cosmic ray muon tomography in a scientific article. The work and the discovery of the corridor were made public in early March by the Egyptian authorities, receiving the global media’s attention. A video summary of the research, including the first visual of the hidden corridor, can be found here.
Using innovative technology is something Schumacher is also deploying in his other great passion–sustainability. Advanced non-destructive evaluation techniques like the ones deployed at the Pyramids can give us information that can determine the materials and condition of our existing civil infrastructure such as bridges, which is especially relevant in cases in which the original plans are not available. With no information, conservative assumptions have to be made in the structural evaluation calculations, potentially significantly limiting the allowable loads for a structure, which in the case of a bridge can limit commercial shipping traffic and deliveries and have a significant impact on communities. Schumacher will be deploying other non-destructive evaluations in his contract for long-term annual monitoring of the Hawthorne and Sauvie Island Bridges, mainly using videos to measure vibrations of the cabling systems to maintain their integrity and safety. “We need to find ways to better maintain the structures we have already built and part of that is understanding the materials they are made of and how they work,” he stresses. “Many great tools exist for this purpose; we just have to start using them more effectively”. Working with local transportation agencies is thus an important way to transfer the knowledge he creates through his research work.
Schumacher's impetus to innovate and collaborate may be a reflection of his nontraditional educational path, which was primarily vocational. Like many PSU students, he is an immigrant, a first-generation student who comes from a family of dairy farmers in Switzerland. He began as a drafting apprentice in his teens, learning how to read and draw structural plans, how to work with engineers and architects, and how Civil Engineering projects come to fruition. After working for a year in construction, he then earned an undergraduate degree at a technical college and worked for five years as a structural and project engineer. Less academic and more vocational, this hands-on experience and emphasis on collaboration paved the way for his advanced Civil Engineering studies later, which he pursued at Oregon State University. Schumacher’s professional ethos is relationship driven and symbiotic collaboration plays a fundamental part in his success. In this vein, he is excited about the possibility of developing an infrastructure engineering and preservation graduate specialty at the Maseeh College, that can pave the way for future engineers who want to specialize in the non-invasive examination, modeling, and management of existing structures with an eye toward preserving them, rather than replacing them.