The research activities in the field of SHM deal with the monitoring of civil infrastructure with a focus on the development of robust automated systems. Low-frequency vibration based systems are developed for damage detection and localization based on ambient vibrations, and high-frequency ultrasonic techniques are developed using embedded piezoelectric transducers to estimate the mechanical properties and the state of damage of concrete. Special attention is paid to the filtering of the environmental effects in order to avoid false alarms. In addition, virtual testing techniques are developed in order to partially replace cost-intensive experimental campaigns used to design and validate SHM systems.
