ME Seminar - Elastic Metamaterials for Improving the Performance of Ultrasonic Guided Wave based Structural Health Monitoring

Guest Speaker: Prof. SHEN Yanfeng

University of Michigan-Shanghai 
Jiao Tong University Joint Institute

Prof. SHEN is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Michigan–Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute, affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received his Bachelor’s degree in engineering mechanics from Wuhan University in 2010 and his Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of South Carolina in 2014. Thereafter, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan till 2016. Shen has published over 100 papers in journals and international conference proceedings. He is currently an Associate Editor for Structural Health Monitoring – An International Journal and ASME Journal of Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnostics and Prognostics of Engineering Systems. He is also an editorial member of Ultrasonics. He is serving as a syndic for Equipment Structural Health Monitoring and Prognostics Society of China. He is also an executive committee member of Nondestructive Diagnostics and Prognostics Division (NDPD) of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). In 2017, he received the best paper award from ASME IMECE conference. In 2018, his was acknowledged with the best paper award from the 4th ICSHMIM conference. Due to his outstanding contribution to the advancement of structural health monitoring, he received the Achenbach Medal from the international structural health monitoring community in 2020. In 2021, he was selected into the Shanghai Rising-star program. In 2023, He received the “highest citation” journal paper award from ASME Journal of NDE.

Ultrasonic guided waves can propagate long distances without much energy loss. They are also sensitive to incipient structural changes at the early stage. Such superior features make them stand out as an ideal tool for Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). However, their application encounters considerable challenges due to their dispersive and multimodal characteristics. The performance of guided wave based SHM and NDE techniques is influenced by the selection of frequency and wave mode. For a practical SHM system, it is hard to flexibly control and select these features. In addition, certain diagnostic methodologies also need to address the issues caused by equipment, such as the inherent nonlinearity problem for nonlinear ultrasonics. Elastic metamaterials have gained increasing attention due to their capability of controlling and manipulating structural waves and vibrations. They can achieve the wave transmission and mode selection for a relatively wide frequency spectrum. Thus, it is of great interest if the wave control ability of metamaterials can serve for improving the performance of ultrasonic guided wave based SHM and NDE. This talk presents the recent research progress at the Active Materials and Intelligent Structures (AMIS) Lab of Shanghai Jiao Tong University on controlling and manipulating guided wave features for enhanced SHM/NDE performance via elastic metamaterials. Various case studies will be shown.