Smart Technologies for Safety Engineering

Smart technologies comprise a dynamic new interdisciplinary research field that encompasses a wide spectrum of engineering applications including, but not limited to, intelligent structures and materials, actuators, sensors and structural observability, control systems and software tools for the design of adaptive structures. Smart technologies focus on the issues surrounding the safety and integrity of engineering systems.

Smart Technologies for Safety Engineering presents the achievements of ten years of research from the Smart-Tech Centre applied to some of the key issues of safety engineering. Results presented include:

• Original methods and software tools for modelling, design, simulation and control of adaptive structures and applicability of the adaptive concept to the design of structures for extreme loads;
• Application of the smart-tech concept to hot research topics and emerging engineering issues including health monitoring of structures and engineering systems, monitoring of loading conditions, automatic structural adaptation to unpredictable, randomly changing dynamic conditions and the optimal design of adaptive structures and engineering systems;
• Numerically efficient and original software packages that can be used for the design of adaptive, as well as passive (without control devices) structures.
• The Virtual Distortion Method, which has been developed especially for fast reanalysis of structures and systems and exact sensitivity analysis, allowing for effective modelling, design, health monitoring and control of smart engineering systems.

The original research and practical applications in Smart Technologies for Safety Engineering will appeal to a broad spectrum of engineers, researchers, professors and graduate students involved in the research, design and development of widely understood  adaptronics and mechatronics, including smart structures and materials, adaptive impact absorption, health and load monitoring, vibration control, vibroacoustics and related issues. 

This book presents the research results obtained over the last decade by the Smart Technology Centre (STC), http://smart.ippt.gov.pl/, operating at the Institute of Fundamental Technological research (IPPT) of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), Warsaw, Poland. It collects achievements of several PhD theses, already completed or still being elaborated. the STC is a division of IPPT-PAN, headed by Prof. Jan Holnicki-Szulc. He graduated from the Warsaw University of Technology in civil Engineering (1969) and simultaneously from the University of Warsaw in Mathematics (1972). Hs PhD thesis (1973) and the habilitation thesis (1983) were defended in IPPT. He spent about 5 years (in the 1980s and 1990s) visiting various labs became eligible for financial support through the European research initiatives, i.e. the 4th, 5th and 6th Framework Programmes.

The first PhD thesis in the STC was defended by Przemystaw Kotakowski (1998) and devoted to the application of the virtual distortion method (VDM) to optimal structural remodeling, treated as a static problem. Then, one of the next these by Tomasz G. Zielinski (2003) contained a generalization of the VDM for structural dynamics and its application to damage identification via the solution of an inverse problem. Anita Ortowska (2007) in her thesis developed an application of the dynamic VDM to the identification of delamination in composite beams. Further development of these numerical tools, allowing for fast and effective structural remodeling and solving coupled dynamic problems (including redistribution of material, stiffness and physical nonlinearity), was done by Marcin Wikto (thesis just completed). Dr Lukasz Jankowski (PhD defended in BAM, Berlin) and Dr Barttomiej Btachowski (PhD defended in IPPT-PAN, Warsaw) joined the STC in 2005 and ar4e both involved in dynamic load identification.

The further development of VDM applications to the structural health monitoring (SHM) concepts and under development in collaboration with the current PhD students Andrzej Swiercz and Marek Kokot (Theses almost completed). Matgorzata Mroz (thesis in progress) is working on the application of the VDM to optimal remodeling of damping properties in dynamically excited structures. Another group of PhD students, Grzegorz Mikutowski and Piotr Pawtowski (theses almost completed), Cezary Graczykowski and Krzysztof Sekuta (theses in progress), Arkadiusz Mroz and Marian Ostrowski (theses in progress), have already obtained interesting research results in the field of adaptive impact absorption (AIA). Finally, Dr Jerzy Motylewski is a key person in the STC in vibroacoust6ic measurement techniques and hardware development.

The team of seventeen co-authors is presented below; their contributions to particular chapters are listed in the Organization of the Book.