Multifunctional
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Welcome to MSL at Kansas State University.
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The Multifunctional Structures Laboratory (MSL) is directed by Dr. Jared Hobeck - an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical & Nuclear Engineering Department at Kansas State University. The research performed at MSL ultimately seeks to develop advanced structural systems capable of active or passive vibration suppression, monitoring their own structural integrity, remembering extreme or traumatic events, providing advanced damage detection warnings, wirelessly transmitting data, environmental sensing, and scavenging enough ambient energy to power the entire system making it automated and self-sustaining. Structures with these capabilities will have unprecedented safety, performance, and reliability thus drastically reducing inspection and maintenance costs for industries including aerospace, automotive, and civil infrastructure.
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What we Do.
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Our research focuses on any combination of six primary building blocks: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), Energy Harvesting (EH), Metastructures (MS), Composite Structures (CS), Structural Dynamics (SD), and Integrated Sensing (IS). Click one of the building blocks below or scroll down to learn more about it.
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Building Blocks of our Research.
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Structural Health Monitoring (SHM)
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The vast field of structural health monitoring (SHM) seeks to develop sensing techniques that can provide some measure of mechanical integrity or "health" of a structure. Just like a medical doctor inspects a patient, SHM can be used to get a health record for a structure such that damage can be detected, located, quantified, and even predicted. This is accomplished using a variety of methods including: electromechanical impedance, wave propagation, electrical resistance tomography, fiber optics, acoustic emission, and structural response. Research in SHM focuses not only on the sensor design, placement, and mechanisms, but also on data analysis, neural networks, and learning algorithms.
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Energy Harvesting (EH)
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Research on the topic of energy harvesting has developed into a large, interdisciplinary field over the past two decades. An energy harvester (or scavenger) may be defined as a device which can be used to extract ambient or otherwise wasted energy from a natural or man-made source, or from any combination of a vast variety of sources. Some types of energy sources for existing harvesting applications are: mechanical vibrations, thermal gradients, flowing fluids, solar energy, chemical processes, and even the motion of a human heartbeat.
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Metastructures (MS)
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In general, we define metastructures as a structural system designed to make its overall behavior (dynamics, acoustics, morphing, etc.) perform better than any one of its base components by modifying or introducing macro-scale features such as geometry, integrated actuators, vibration absorbers, circuits, etc. Advanced fabrication technologies such as 3D printing, CNC laser/water-jet cutting, and integrated circuitry are utilized to achieve highly complex unique structures for experimental validation.
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Composite Structures (CS)
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Our work with composite structures focuses on - but is not limited to - fiber reinforced composites (FRCs) such as carbon fiber, fiberglass, Kevlar or a hybrid combination of fibers. Structures made with composite materials have become extremely popular and are widely used especially in the aerospace and automotive industries. Composite materials make up approximately 50% of the weight of Boeing's Dreamliner 787 aircraft where the fuselage is made almost entirely of composites. While composites are very strong and light compared to other conventional engineering materials, their fatigue life and failure modes are not as well known or predictable; so a lot of our research with composites is centered around health monitoring (SHM) and failure prediction.
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Structural Dynamics (SD)
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This building block almost speaks for itself and is at the heart of many SHM, energy harvesting, and metastructures topics. If you have plucked a guitar string, hit a drum, or jumped off a diving board you have seen (and in many cases heard) structural dynamics in action. All real structures are elastic so when a force is applied they experience some form of deflection. If, for example, that force is periodic or suddenly removed, the structure will begin to vibrate. Vibrations like these or even waves propagating through a structure like ripples on a pond are all types of structural dynamics.
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Integrated Sensing (IS)
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As industry demands (and as we design) smarter structures, we also need smarter sensing. Sticking thousands of sensors onto a structure is sometimes possible; however, most of the time it is not practical. Instead, what if the sensors could also serve as integrated structural components? Or what if we can use fewer sensors to get the same information as many sensors? What if many sensors could be seamlessly integrated into a structure and designed to more efficiently communicate information? These are a few of the major questions that this aspect of our research seeks to address.
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