A Survey of Structural Health Monitoring Research in Italy

Abstract

In this paper a general survey of the research activities in the field of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), carried out in the past years and planned to be performed soon in Italy, has been presented. The survey have covered both the research activities that have been performed in the context of the Universities and Research Centres and those carried out in a Industrial ambit. The present survey encompass manly the Aeronautical field, but also the Civil Engineering fields is partly covered due to the involvement of one of the co-authors. I. Introduction TRUCTURAL Health Monitoring and/or continuous on-line monitoring of structural integrity are of primary concern in many engineering fields as aerospace, automotive, large civil structures and other industrial applications. The replacement of present day manual inspection techniques with more advanced sensitive and automatic health monitoring system would reduce substantially the maintenance and the related life-cycle costs of these structures. Much of structural health monitoring research is motivated by the fact that damage tolerant and fail-safe design of aircraft, aerospace and civil structures requires a substantial amount of inspection and defects- monitoring at regular intervals [1–3]. With the risk of failure and the cost of scheduled but unneeded maintenance ever increasing, intelligent real-time monitoring is imperative to guarantee safe and affordable structures. Two general approaches are currently being investigated in an effort to develop an effective structural health monitoring system for new as well as aging structures. One is the global approach, which measures and analyzes damage-induced changes in the vibrational properties (e.g., modal frequencies and mode shapes). The other is a local approach whereby changes in the characteristics of ultrasonic waves propagating across existing defects or created by emerging defects are measured and analyzed. Considerable research efforts in both these directions are produced in universities, research centres and industries all around the word. Starting around 1990, significant activities have been performed also in Italy, with a simultaneously starting in the aerospace and large civil structures fields. The two types of structure in which the large cost of acquisition and the larger cost for maintenance and overhaul make necessary to detect damage as soon as possible and prevent larger destructive collapse of the structure to occur. The present work will try to document the activities carried out until now on both fields addressing research activities performed in Universities, Research Centres and Industries. During the years, many research projects having SHM as the main objective or a specific topic have been funded both at National (Ministry of Education and Research, MIUR-PRIN and MIUR-PON general programs) and European (EU Research Office, 4 th to 7 th Framework Programs) levels. The proposed survey tries to encompass all these projects, focusing on those having a direct involvement of the authors research teams.