SPIE Smart Structures/NDE 2015 included more than 700 attendees and 800 presentations, and marked the 22nd year of a collaborative meeting that brings related communities together into a unique symposium. There is a growing synergy between advanced "smart" materials and the sensor networks developed to analyze the health of bridges, buildings, and bodies. Inspiration from the natural world is a prominent theme.
As material structures become more sophisticated, there are corresponding networks of sensor systems to evaluate their relative health. Future civil infrastructure will feature advanced materials with embedded sensor networks that give real-time feedback on their integrity and safety. Read more below:
Plenary presentations
SSM and NDE Lifetime Achievement Awards
SPIE Fellow recognition
Student lunch with the experts
Poster session
EAP-in-Action
Plenary presentations
Don Leo (above), Univ. of Georgia, presented a talk combining the future of material design with sophisticated sensor systems and self-healing properties.
Other plenary speakers were:
- Alexander Michaelis, Fraunhofer-IKTS, on potential and challenges for smart advanced ceramic materials
- Nobuo Takeda, Univ. of Tokyo, on optical-fiber-based structural health and process monitoring of advanced composite structures
- Massimo Ruzzene, Georgia Institute of Technology, on guided acoustic wavefield imaging for damage detection, structural characterization, and transducer design
- Shiv Joshi, NextGen Aeronautics, on smart sensors and actuator concepts and products
SSM and NDE Lifetime Achievement Awards
NDE Lifetime Achievement Award presented to Peter Nagy (left), Univ. of Cincinnati.
SSM Lifetime Achievement Award presented to Gregory Carman (left), Univ. of California, Los Angeles, program committee member for the conference on Behavior and Mechanics of Multifunctional Materials and Composites.
SPIE Fellow recognition
Above, SPIE Fellow and Nano-, Bio-, Info-Tech Systems conference chair Vijay Varadan (left) of Pennsylvania State Univ. with Tzu-Yang Yu, who accepted the plaque on behalf of new SPIE Fellow Ming Wang, Northeastern Univ.
Varadan congratulates new SPIE Fellow Kyo Song, Norfolk State Univ.
Student lunch
The student lunch with experts is always well-attended and provides a great forum for small-group discussions.
Poster session
Posters sessions offering one-on-one time with authors are always a big highlight of the week.
EAP-in-Action
The 17th annual EAP(electroactive poylmers materials)-in-Action session brings international teams together who demonstrate their work in electroactive polymers, or artificial muscles. This year saw teams representing eight different countries.
Samuel Rosset, Oluwaseun Araromi, Alexandre Poulin, and Jun Shintake, from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne demonstrate high-speed silicone DEAs.
Viljar Palmre, Jameson Lee, Sara Trabia, Shelby Nelson, Tyler Stalbaum, and Qi Shen from the Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas, demonstrate advanced IPMC actuators and sensors.
Soheil Kianzad and students from the Univ. of British Columbia demonstrate polymer and nylon based sensors and actuators.
Harbin Institute of Technology students demonstrate a soft crawling robot based on dielectric elastomer.
All photos © SPIE except where noted.
