Infrastructure, health, entertainment technologies to be advanced at SPIE Smart Structures/NDE
Applications in green technologies, life sciences, infrastructure evaluation, and entertainment will be advanced through more than 750 technical papers and other presentations next week during the SPIE Smart Structures/NDE meeting in San Diego, Calif.
Special events include the perennially compelling EAP-in-Action demonstration session, plenary talks on aeronautics R&D, small-scale energy production, and other topics, and presentations by three funding agencies.
The event will be held 8-12 March at the Town and Country Resort and Convention Center, and includes a two-day exhibition running Tuesday and Wednesday with free admission for registered attendees.
Lifetime Achievement awards will be awarded to two scientists.
Gordon Wallace, Director of the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute and Executive Research Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science at Wollongong Univ., Australia, will be awarded the 2009 Smart Structures and Materials Lifetime Achievement Award. His research employs intelligent polymers in developing biocommunications from the molecular to skeletal domains in order to improve human performance via medical bionics.
R. Bruce Thompson, Director of the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State Univ., USA, will be awarded the 2009 Nondestructive Evaluation Lifetime Achievement Award. Thompson's research concerns ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation such as noncontact sensors, microstructure characterization, measurement models, and model-assisted determination of probability of detection. Dr. Thompson will give a plenary talk at next week's event.
Plenary speakers include:
- Jaiwon Shin, NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, USA, on "Future Challenges in Aeronautics R&D"
- Paolo Ermanni, ETH Zürich, Switzerland, on "Beyond PZT-Based Actuators: Bridging Material Science and Engineering"
- Eric Yeatman, Imperial College London, UK, on "Energy Harvesting: Small-Scale Energy Production from Ambient Sources"
- Bruce Thompson, Center for Nondestructive Evaluation, USA, on "NDE Simulations: Critical Tools in the Integration of NDE and SHM"
- Brenda Kulfan, The Boeing Co., USA, on "A Paleo-aerodynamic Exploration of the Evolution of Nature's Flyers, Man's Aircraft, and the Needs and Options for Future Technology Innovations."
The 11th annual EAP-in-Action session on Monday afternoon will feature demonstrations of eight applications of electroactive polymer (EAP) technology, including a device for harvesting energy from moving streams, a system driven by facial expressions, and others. Entries are from China, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the USA. See more about the demonstrations on the event website, at spie.org/x31485.xml.
The demonstration was the venue in 2005 for the first human-versus-EAP robot arm-wrestling contest. It is is organized by Yoseph Bar-Cohen, Senior Research Scientist and Group Supervisor, Advanced Technologies and the Nondestructive Evaluation and Advance Actuators Lab (ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov), at the Jet Propulsion Lab, and chair of the EAP Actuators and Devices conference at SPIE Smart Structures/NDE.
Demetri Terzopoulos, Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science at the Univ. of California, Los Angeles, USA, and winner of an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for his pioneering work on physics-based computer animation, will give a keynote presentation in the EAP conference.
Representatives of three U.S. funding agencies -- NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), ONR (Office of Naval Research), and NSF (National Science Foundation) -- will give talks on current and future programs and initiatives.
Winners of the 2009 Smart Structures Product Implementation Award and 2009 SPIE/ASME Best Student Paper awards from a special session featuring competition finalists will be named on-site.
Conference proceedings manuscripts will be published online in the SPIE Digital Library as soon as approved following the conference. The SPIE Digital Library contains more than 270,000 articles on optics and photonics research, with approximately 20,000 new journal and proceedings articles added each year. Read more about the SPIE Digital Library online at spie.org/x2836.xml or access papers via subscription or pay-per-view via the SPIE Digital Library website.
Symposium chairs are Alison Flatau, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, USA; George Baaklini, NASA Glenn Research Center, USA; Donald Leo, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ., USA; and Kara Peters, North Carolina State Univ., USA.
The event is sponsored by SPIE and co-sponsored by ASME. The Intelligent Materials Forum of Japan, Jet Propulsion Lab, and NSF are cooperating organizations.