The second training event was organised by the Bochum University of Applied Sciences (Hochschule Bochum). It was made up by three thematic areas: transferable skills, fundamentals on POD and guided wave simulation, as well as application notes from automotive and aerospace industries. Unfortunately, this event had also to be held online due to the pandemic situation.

Transferable skills

How to write a good scientific paper – and what is to be understood by good? To find clues on these questions, our ESRs have taken the chance to receive help of experts on this field. A professional trainer, Dr. Martina Michalikova (Writing Scientist), helped to develop writing competences of our ESRs within a Scientific Writing and Publishing Workshop. The workshop was held in three separate sessions - prior to, during and after the training event. This allowed our ESRs to process the material in between the sessions, to ask questions during the following sessions, to prepare abstracts for upcoming conferences and to get the professional feedback. The ESRs enjoyed the workshop a lot and appreciated helpful practical insights of the trainer, which we could see from their positive feedback. A very intense search for clues was our “Talk to the editor”-Session. The ESRs caught the opportunity to talk to the managing editor of the most important journal in our field, the SHM Journal. Prof. Dr. Michael Todd (University of California) kindly agreed to share the information of the publishing process of this journal and to answer numerous questions.

Fundamentals

Model assisted quality assessment for guided wave-based systems has been the overarching topic of our fundamentals sessions. On the first day, Prof. Dr. Inka Mueller (Hochschule Bochum) and Dr. Kilian Tschöke (Fraunhofer IKTS) presented established techniques of quality assessment for methods used in Non-Destructive Testing and the ways to adopt these to SHM-Systems. The second day followed with fundamentals on the spectral Finite Element Method (FEM) by Dr. Alexandre Imperiale (CEA) and its validation with respect to SHM applications by Dr. Olivier Mesnil (CEA). On this basis, the ESRs got hands-on experience and deep insights in the special modelling software CIVA (Extende). Its SHM Module is based on the spectral FEM and allows to perform fast computations, which can also be used for quality assessment. Some of the ESRs have already managed to model examples which may be useful for their work. These examples, along with the overall progress of the individual research projects, were presented by the ESRs during the dedicated ESRs’ sessions. Within interaction groups, the ESRs prepared a joint presentation based common ground in their scientific work highlighting the strength of the network character. Although it was a challenging task, because our ESRs never met in person yet, these sessions have been very successful and helped to strengthen the collaborations.

Application notes

While secondments have been difficult to realize within the last year, we want to make sure that our ESRs never forget to take into account the application engineers perspective. Different perspectives were given by the presenters with respect to the aerospace and automotive applications. Project partners, Dr. Ronny Sachse and Dr. Chiara Pernechele gave overviews about SHM applications at Airbus Defence & Space and Dallara Automobili, respectively. An invited talk, from Friedrich von Dungern (Invent) covered developments of piezoelectric transducers for aerospace and automotive applications, and their integration into structures. Our ESRs but also the referees have been delighted to see the importance of research in guided waved-based SHM. At the same time, the deep insights into industrial requirements helps our ESRs to understand and always keep in mind the current challenges and requirements of the industries.

Social evening

Even though, it is challenging to have a nice social evening online, still it did not stop the participants to have a lot of fun during cooking of Israeli street food under the supervision of a professional cook, Shay Dashevsky. A lot of tasty shakshuka, pitas and good vibes will stay in the memory of participants for the years to come!