Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Structural Health monitoring workshop/ Manchester: 7-9 July 2018


Bonjour
Previously I gave a brief introduction about my project and goals, and as a huge part of my work involves instrumentation and monitoring, I took this opportunity to attend a workshop on structural health monitoring in Manchester, United Kingdom. As I mentioned earlier, my work involves pavement structures and its instrumentation and usually, I find myself dealing with a lot of sensors and transducers for monitoring purposes. So this workshop, not just concentrated on the different aspects of the structural health monitoring but also on analyzing the data received from it. The interesting part of this workshop was that it integrated different fields like civil engineering, electronics, electrical, digital communication and statistics. More specifically we get to learn how various aspects of technology and science that are used for structural monitoring on a larger scale and how each field has its own significances and contribution.

The part that I found interesting and related to my work was the SHM sensing technologies in which they explained in detail the state of the art sensing technologies used for different applications and their physical or electronic properties which are important to observe in order to extract the required information. Along with that, other topics included were the data acquisition systems, digital signal processing for treating the data and the statistics to quantify and conclude the results obtained from this monitoring system. This again is just one perspective on this topic. There was also a discussion on how this could be extended to incorporate machine learning and big data aspects of it.
From this short course, we got a better understanding of how vast this field is and the future of structural health monitoring. So that was the brief overview of the workshop, I will link down the information about the instructors and the book regarding this specific topic. So, this is it for this post until next time ciao ciao!!
The instructors:
Dr. Charles Farrar, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Dr. Eric Flynn, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Professor Michael Todd, University of California – San Diego
The book:
Structural Health Monitoring: A Machine Learning Perspective 1st Edition