Special Session 7

Aerospace, mechanical, and civil engineering structures continue to be used despite approaching or having already exceeded their design life. Therefore, novel and cost-effective techniques are sought to monitor those structures’ health and dynamics response and reduce the need for schedule-based maintenance. Structural health monitoring (SHM) and Non-destructive testing and evaluation (NDT&E) provide a variety of approaches for addressing resilience and safety issues of aging structures and infrastructure systems based on the data collected using contact and non-contact sensors. However, once collected, those data must be analyzed and mined to assess the conditions of the targeted system. In this context, Building Information Modelling (BIM) has emerged as a robust repository and data management tool to store and exchange data related to the built environment, including long sequences of SHM and NDT&E data. This session aims to serve as a platform to explore recent theoretical and experimental efforts and future directions in the integration of BIM techniques for applications in the SHM and NDT&E domains. Scholars are invited to contribute with original research, case studies, industrial applications, and advancements over the current state of the art.

Dr. Alessandro Sabato, earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Calabria - Italy, in December 2014. During his doctoral studies, he spent 18 months at Columbia University as a visiting Ph.D. student and Research Associate working on experimental testing for vibration-based monitoring of heritage buildings and oil-drilling pipelines. In October 2015, Dr. Sabato joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell as a Post-doctoral research fellow where he investigated innovative sensing for structural evaluation. From September 2019, he is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the same University, working the integration of non-contact, wireless, and computer vision techniques with unmanned vehicles for automated assessment of large-scale engineering systems. His research interests include acoustics, nondestructive testing and evaluation, sensors development, smart structures, structural dynamics, and structural health monitoring. Over the past two years, Dr. Sabato and his research group received ~$1.7M from federal agencies, private companies, and industrial partners to progress data analytics in those thrust areas. More information about his group's past and current projects can be found at https://sites.uml.edu/alessandro-sabato/.

Raffaele Zinno, Ph.D. in Chemical Technologies and New Materials (1995), Master’s Degree in Civil Engineering (1988) at University of Calabria (Italy). In 1992/1994 he was visiting doctoral student at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering - West Virginia University (Morgantown, WV, U.S.A.). From 1997 to 1998 he was a researcher at the CNR - Central Institute for Industrialization and Building Technology, Rome. Since 1998 he is Associate Professor of Strength of Materials and Structural Engineering at the University of Calabria, Department of Environmental Engineering. In 2018 he obtained the Italian National Scientific Qualification (ASN) as full professor in his scientific area.

His main research interests are:

• Structural Health Monitoring (SHM);
• Structural uses of wood and related experiments;
• Theoretical analysis of structures in composite material (problems of damage in composite material, bending and buckling of structures in ordinary and advanced materials, etc.);
• Experiments on innovative materials (composites, fiber-reinforced or high-performance concretes, self-diagnostic, smart, etc.) and on structures made with them;
• Design of structures in innovative material;
• Problems of dynamic analysis of structures.

He founded and directs the SMART Lab (Structural Monitoring, structural Advanced materials, structural Rehabilitation, structural Testing Laboratory) at the University of Calabria.