Laminated composites are increasingly being used today in aerospace, automobile and civil structures. However, due to complexity of design, high operational load and expected enhancement of life-time, the composite structures are more prone to unpredicted failures. Continuous structural health monitoring is expected to be one of the primary requirements to ensure safety and high performance. Such futuristic health monitoring strategy is based on a fusion of technological domains pertaining to composite structure, dynamics and vibration control, sensors and actuators, networking, data handling etc.

As a part of DST-UKIERI ongoing project on Optimal Vibration Control of Composite Structures , a two-day workshop is organized on 29th to 30 th November, 2010 in this direction. The following broad issues are identified and addressed in the workshop:

Damage identification using dynamic system response
Model updating based on experimental modal analysis.
Use of MEMS based specialty damping layer.
Wireless Sensor Networks and Power Transfer
Multiobjective optimization of damage and structural stiffness.
Aggressive Data reduction and Data fusion schemes.
Bio-composites experiences from development of bio-engineered systems.

SMSS laboratory has developed collaborative links with two of the famous island countries of the world - Japan and UK. Through a productive link with Prof. Harutoshi Ogai of Waseda University, Japan, our lab has developed crawler robots for pipe health monitoring. The two robots Mushik and Mogurinko are developed with touch sensors which can sense the faults in pipes precisely.

The UK-India research initiative and DST, India have jointly funded a project of Profs. Peter Fleming and Bishakh Bhattacharya in which the delamination in composite laminate could be detected and controlled in real-time by using the dynamic response of the system. The technology is envisaged to be highly demanding in the field of Health monitoring of Composites for Aerospace appplications.