Preface

Abstract

Because of environmental and man-made hazards, large civil structures such as highways, buildings and bridges can subject users of such systems to unacceptably large motions, unsafe conditions, and can potentially cause catastrophic damage in the absence of structural control. Structural control has been proposed as a strategy for minimizing these large motions while preserving the integrity of civil infrastructure systems. The closely coupled structural, mechanical, thermal, geological and aerodynamic environment of these structures offers many unique opportunities to apply smart materials and structures technology to control, monitor and assess the state of civil infrastructure systems. The motivation for investigating the application of smart materials and structure technology to large civil infrastructure arises from the desire to mitigate potential risk to the general public and to ensure the viability of civil infrastructure systems. Because of the potential benefit that smart structures technology may offer to mitigate risk to environmental hazards, strong research efforts have been undertaken in the US and Japan to investigate the feasibility of using this technology for structural control. To address key issues associated with the application of smart structures technology to large civil infrastructure, a workshop was held on 14 November 1996 (Pines and Hiriashi 1996 Proceedings of US-Japan Workshop on Smart Structures Technology: Application to Large Civil Structures) at the University of Maryland to foster discussion on (i) the design and development of smart structures technology for civil infrastructure; (ii) the integration of smart structures technology into large civil infrastructure and (iii) the use of such technology for monitoring and structural control. The goal of the workshop was to gather Japanese and US experts from academia, industry and government laboratories to assess the state of the art of the technology as applied to the large civil infrastructure. Key objectives of this proposed workshop were: to discuss recent applications of smart structures technology to large civil structures to identify future research thrusts involving smart structures technology to stimulate future cooperative research activities between US and Japanese researchers to continue to build and establish long term cooperative research programs between university, laboratory and industry professionals The specific technical areas of interest for this workshop were: active and passive damping active vibration control smart retrofit/repair infrastructure health monitoring/damage assessment sensor and actuator technology The workshop was sponsored by: National Science Foundation (NSF) NIST UJNR TASK Committees C&G The interest and support of K Chong and S C Liu of the US National Science Foundation is greatly appreciated. We are also indebted to all participants whose attendance and contributions helped to foster important discussions on issues associated with the application of the technology to large civil infrastructure. The workshop served as the basis for this special issue. D J Pines Guest Editor Department of Aerospace Engineering University of Maryland College Park MD 20742 USA H Hiraishi Guest Editor Building Research Institute Ministry of Construction Tachihara-1 Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki 305 Japan