Advanced Structures Laboratory

Mission

The mission of the Advanced Structures Laboratory (ASL)  is to explore transformative fundamental science to improve the safety, durability, maintainability, and sustainability of engineered structures. 

Vision

The ASL advances its mission through the exploration of intelligent materials and structures that have an innate ability to detect, report, and/or respond to their condition.  The group focused on advancing embedded and automated damage detection (Structural Health Monitoring = SHM) and embedded structural repair (self-healing) capabilities.  These capabilities are complemented with work in composite material design, architected materials, and metamaterials.  Together, these capabilities have the potential to found a paradigm shift in engineering by altering the definition of failure and capabilities for repair resulting in lighter weight, more efficient, and safer structures.

Current research is exploring novel approaches to distributed actuation and sensing employing piezoelectric materials and shape memory alloys.  Research regularly involves investigating and employing unique material properties in novel ways to create new capabilities using a combination of experimentation, analytical models, and computational simulations.

Advanced Structures Laboratory (ASL):

The ASL seeks to advance the field of intelligent structures by researching critical issues that currently inhibit their use adoption including:

• Sensor design to reduce data and simplify interpretation
• New actuator and sensor technologies
• Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and automated damage detection
• Ultrasonic signal transmission
• Self-healing materials
• Properties of shape memory alloys