Antonino Morassi

Antonino Morassi

Antonino Morassi
University of Udine    ITALY

Antonino Morassi is full professor of Mechanics of Solids and Structures at the University of Udine, Italy, since 2003. He was visiting researcher and visiting professor at various institutions, including University of Waterloo (Canada, 1994), Kentucky University (USA, 1995), Hokkaido University (Sapporo, Japan, 2003, 2004, 2008). He has a background in Structural Engineering and Mathematics, and his research activity is mainly focussed on inverse problems in engineering. He has treated general and applied problems in structural identification through non-destructive methods, such as damage detection in mechanical systems by dynamic or static data, identification of inclusions in elastic bodies by boundary measurements, characterization of isospectral systems. On these topics he has developed an extensive experimental activity on the use of dynamic methods to medium-scale models and to full-scale structures. He has also studied theoretical problems for thin structures in linear elasticity, giving a justification of some classical theories for the determination of the stress field in thin beams.

The results of his work - about seventy research papers - have been published in major international journals.

Research stay at UC3M: DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Project: Non-destructive evaluation techniques for identification and diagnosis of mechanical systems, and related inverse problems.

Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) techniques for identification and diagnosis constitute an interdisciplinary research field of up-to-date international relevance in several engineering areas. Applications of NDE methods lead to inverse problems, that is problems in which one wishes to determine some mechanical or geometrical property of a system on the basis of measurements of its response. Therefore, pathologies typical of this class of problems occur, such as non-uniqueness of the solution or non-continuous dependence of the solution on the data. When NDE techniques are applied to the study of real mechanical systems, additional difficulties arise because of the complexity of structural modelling, the inaccuracy of the analytical models used for the interpretation of the experiments and the effect of measurement errors.

Aim of the project is to give a contribution on the study of the identification and diagnostic techniques via NDE methods under both the general and practical aspects. One goal of the research concerns with the detection of defects in plates by natural frequency measurements. In particular, an extension of the so-called Fourier Coefficient Method, originally developed for damage detection in beams, will be attempted, and the identification of localized defects by minimal natural frequency data will be considered. Another topic is the identification of cracks in rotating shafts, a subject on which the research team FABDIS of the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid has significant experience. In this case, the different sensitivity of the various natural frequencies to damage will be explored in order to localize the defects. In connection with the above topics, the construction of vibrating systems with localized singularities/defects and having specified spectral properties will be also investigated.

Stay period: OCT 2013 - SEP 2014