Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is an emerging technology, dealing with the development and implementation of techniques and systems where monitoring, inspection and damage detection become an integral part of structures and thus a matter of automation. It further merges with a variety of techniques related to diagnostics and prognostics.
SHM emerged from the field of smart structures and laterally encompasses disciplines such as structural dynamics, materials and structures, fatigue and fracture, non-destructive testing and evaluation, sensors and actuators, microelectronics, signal processing and much more. To be effective in the development of SHM systems, a multidisciplinary approach is therefore required. Without this global view it will be difficult for engineers to holistically manage the operation of an engineering structure through its life cycle in the future and to generate new breakthroughs in structural engineering.
The European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring (EWSHM) was first successfully run in 2002 in Cachan near Paris/France, followed by events held in Munich/Germany (2004), Granada/Spain (2006), Krakow/Poland (2008) and Sorrento/Italy (2010). It has grown over the years significantly and has become the strong counterpart to the International Workshop on SHM (IWSHM) held in Stanford/CA every odd year.
In 2012 EWSHM will be merged a very first time with the 1st European Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) Society. Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) has become an increasingly important subject, specifically within the context of getting SHM into application. The Prognostics and Health Management Society (PHM Society) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of PHM as an engineering discipline. It was incorporated in early 2009, holds an annual conference in North America, and is founded on three basic principles:
- To provide free and unrestricted access to PHM knowledge;
- To promote interdisciplinary and international collaboration in PHM;
- To lead the advancement of PHM as an engineering discipline.
This is the Society’s first conference in Europe and the first held jointly with SHM. The Conference will bring together the global community of PHM experts from industry, academia, and government in perse application areas such as energy, aerospace, transportation, automotive, and industrial automation. The conference will feature tutorials, a panel session, technical papers and a joint session with SHM.
Topics of Interest:
- PHM system design and engineering
- PHM sensors and detection methodologies
- Physics of failure prognostics
- Asset health management
- Structural health management
- PHM for electronics
- Diagnosis and fault isolation methods
- Data-driven and model-based prognostics
- Condition-Based Maintenance technologies
- Standards and methodologies
- Fault-adaptive control methods
- Return-on-investment analysis
- Deployed applications and success stories
Bringing SHM and PHM therefore next to each other along two conferences held with a significant overlap will therefore provide the two communities with some new dimensions hopefully bringing added value to both of them.
Scope
EWSHM addresses a fairly wide field in science including subjects such as:
- Physical monitoring principles in general (visual, mechanical, acoustic, electrical, thermal, etc.)
- Signal processing (FFT, wavelet, PCA, feature extraction, pattern recognition, etc.)
- Structural simulation (stress & strain, modal, acoustics, electromagnetics, thermal, neural networks, etc.)
- Sensors and sensor systems (piezoelectric, fibre optic, electromagnetic, MEMS, nano agents, etc.)
- Principles of SHM-based structural monitoring, design, and maintenance
- SHM applications (aerospace, marine, railway, automotive, pipelines, civil engineering, energy generation and distribution, production, etc.)