Special Technical Sessions

The 2nd European Conference of the PHM Society – PHME14 – in Nantes, France (July 8-10, 2014) will be organized in conjunction with the 7th European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring (EWSHM14). Therefore, taking advantage of the two communities coming together and to provide maximum opportunity for technical dialogue and networking, three special technical sessions will be organized (mentioned below), focusing on methods and approaches for prognostics and health management of structures.

Researchers are invited to submit original full length papers and/or student posters on the following three special technical sessions:

  1. Integration of Structural Health/Life Management Systems for Structures – to discuss broader aspects of integrating state-of-the-art techniques and tools into real systems.
  2. Monitoring Techniques for PHM of Composite Structures – to discuss fundamental aspects of monitoring, detection, and prediction in Composite materials and structures, which is an emerging field within SHM with the advancement in materials and manufacturing.
  3. Prognostic Health Management of Wind Energy Infrastructures – to discuss topics related to PHM of in-land and off-shore wind energy structures.

We believe that technical discussions in these two areas will be of great interest to the SHM audience as well and will give them a flavour of prognostic methods and approaches as applied to SHM. These sessions will complement the SHM topic areas and help establish a closer connection between the two communities through an active dialogue. Further details about the session can be seen below. Please feel free to contact any of the co-chairs of the respective sessions if you have any questions about these sessions.

For submission related questions please contact the technical program committee at phme_tpc@phmconference.org or visit www.phmeurope.org for more information. Please note that participants need to be registered in PHME14 to present a paper in this conference. We look forward to your submissions and hope to see you in Nantes in July.

Integration of Structural Health/Life Management Systems for Structures

Session Chair: Dr. Hamza E. Boukabache (ECA Group, Toulouse, France – boukabache.he@ecagroup.com)
Session Details:

Structural health management is one of the key technologies to ensure safety and reliability of long use structures in general but aircrafts in particular. Non-destructive testing based current methods for periodic inspections are not only prohibitively expensive but also not sufficient to ensure safety. SHM technology on the other hand has matured and reached a good technology readiness level (TRL), however, lacks proper integration into the vehicle platforms as this often requires advanced system architecture to accommodate SHM sensing and processing on-board. This becomes especially challenging in the aerospace industry due to scale, weight and cost constraints. Therefore, approaches to innovate in the area of SHM development and integration methods are sought through topics such as below:

  • Sensor systems for structural damage detection and health prognostics
  • Reconfigurable embedded systems for multi-sensors interfacing and instrumentation
  • Integrated diagnostics and prognostics architectures
  • Algorithms for health assessment and prognosis based on multiple sensors data
  • Model-based approaches for robust prognostics and health management
  • Data mining methods for structural health management
  • Damage detection and failure prediction in structures

Monitoring Techniques for PHM of Composite Structures

Session Chair: Dr. Guillermo Rus (University of Granada, Spain – grus@ugr.es)
Student Coordinators: Manuel Chiachio (University of Granada, Spain, mchiachio@ugr.es)
Juan Chiachio (University of Granada, Spain, jchiachio@ugr.es)
Session Details

Improved SHM systems would include detection, diagnosis and prognosis capabilities to fully exploit their sensing capability. The key question to ask is – Can we listen to damage? Ultrasound is a mechanical wave and is therefore ideally suited to interrogate mechanical condition and functionality of materials and structures. The interaction between these waves and the internal microstructure obeys the rational principles of Solid Mechanics and can be therefore fundamentally modeled and understood. However significant challenges are nowadays waiting for researchers to unveil answers, such as tackling the structural complexity of composite materials, how to integrate ultrasonic readings directly into prognosis algorithms, or how to optimally design the modality and configuration of ultrasound and the sensor positioning, just to give mention a few. Likewise, other methods based on fiber optic sensors such as Fiber Bragg Gratings, magnetostrictive sensors, piezoelectric sensors, strain gages, or vibration monitoring are of interest for this session.

In this spirit, this session aims to foster the exchange of new ideas by gathering the state-of-the-art developments pertaining to computational mechanics, sensing, signal processing and materials science. It aims to include, but is not limited to the treatment of problems such as:

  • Fatigue monitoring by ultrasonics
  • Fiber Bragg Grating monitoring and prognosis technology
  • Vibration analysis for structure health prognosis
  • Acoustic emission for prognosis
  • Ultrasound-based SHM in composites
  • Composites monitoring by ultrasonics
  • Ultrasound-damage interaction
  • Real time reliability assessment
  • Integrating SHM and PHM using model-based ultrasound measurements
  • Bayesian methods for ultrasonic damage monitoring
  • On-line techniques for structural health monitoring and prognostics
  • Predictive inference integration with ultrasonics
  • Probabilistic mechanics of evolutionary properties
  • Nonlinear ultrasonics
  • Sensor design and positioning
  • SHM data digital filtering and processing

Prognostic Health Management of Wind Energy Infrastructures

Session Chair: Dr. Marcias Martinez (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands – m.j.martinez@tudelft.nl)
Session Details

This session focuses on topics related to PHM of in-land and off-shore wind energy structures. In particular papers and posters on the following research topics are solicited:

  • Asset Management – discuss how the data obtained from different wind energy farms is being utilized for structural/service/maintenance lifing assessment.
  • Structural Health Monitoring – the use of broad range of sensing techniques for damage and load monitoring applications.
  • Future trends on diagnostic and prognostic algorithms – a broad discussion on the use of future technologies not currently available in the field for achieving a condition based maintenance approach.