Seminar: Smart Structures and Metastructures in Vibration Problems

Abstract

The field of adaptive structures or smart structures has grown and expanded from the early days of smart materials to today’s research in multifunctional structures, adaptive composites and more recently metastructures. This talk touches on each of these topics but does so from the point of view of applications consisting of structural monitoring, energy harvesting for small electronics, vibration suppression and gust alleviation in unmanned air vehicles.

Smart materials consist of transducer materials such as shape memory alloys, piezoelectric materials and electroactive polymers.  Most the applications presented here use the piezoelectric effect.  Metastructure refers to the use of periodic inserts placed in a structure to give it enhanced abilities such as high damping.

About the Speaker

Daniel J. Inman received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in Mechanical Engineering in 1980 and is Chair of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, as well as the C. L. “Kelly” Johnson Collegiate Professor. Since 1980, he has published eight books (on vibration, energy harvesting, control, statics, and dynamics), eight software manuals, 20 book chapters, over 300 journal papers and 533 proceedings papers, given 62 keynote or plenary lectures, graduated 61 Ph.D. students and supervised more than 75 MS degrees.  He works in the area of applying smart structures to solve aerospace engineering problems including energy harvesting, structural health monitoring, vibration suppression and morphing.  He is a Fellow of ASME, AIAA, IIAV and AAM.

Hosted by Professor Rama Yedavalli