In celebration of International Women’s Day and Women at Imperial Week, we are delighted to invite you to a talk by Aeronautics Professor Zahra Sharif Khodaei as she explores her journey of research and career within Structural Health Monitoring.

The talk will be followed by a catered reception (CAGB Level 2 Concourse).

Introduction to Structural Health Monitoring: A smart maintenance concept for composite aeronautical structures

Abstract

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a remote non-destructive inspection technique that enables instantaneous maintenance requests when a system’s health falls below a predefined level of confidence. The concept of SHM is to continuously monitor the state of a structure with permanently installed sensors and allow for condition-based maintenance (CBM) where maintenance action is carried out only when a threat to the structures’ integrity is detected.

Zahra Sharif Khodaei finished her PhD in Czech technical university in Prague and joined Imperial College as a postdoctoral research in 2009. Since 2010 she has been working on developing SHM concepts across various European projects, starting from numerical modelling to gain an understanding of the behaviour of guided wave travelling through isotropic and later anisotropic structures.

She joined the Department of Aeronautics as a Lecturer in 2014 and since then she has been contributing significantly to increasing the maturity of SHM technologies as well as methodologies. She is the co-founder of the Structural Integrity and Health Monitoring research group in the Department.

Having started with 2 sensors and one data acquisition unit in the corner of a wind tunnel lab, she now runs one of the most advanced SHM laboratories in Europe.

In this seminar she will talk about her journey, of taking SHM from just an idea on a small metallic beam, to the current state of the art which is the sensorisation of a 5m long composite fuselage panel to demonstrate the potential industrialisation of SHM techniques.