Conférencier: Tribikram Kundu
Professor of the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Professor of the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA

Abstract: Use of ultrasonic and electromagnetic waves is continuously increasing for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM) in civil, aerospace, electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineering applications. To extract the damage information from recorded signals one needs to understand the mechanics of wave propagation in various problem geometries and the interaction between proppagating waves and internal defects in solids. Unfortunately, only for simple structures, such as homogeneous and layered half-spaces, unbounded plates, rods and pipes, the analytical solutions are available. Complex structures with internal defects are difficult to solve analytically or numerically by the popular finite element method because at high frequencies the size of the finite elements becomes prohibitively small. An alternative mesh-free technique called the distributed point source method (DPSM) is being developed for solving such problems. Current state of DPSM – recent advances and challenges - will be discussed in this presentation along with some expeerimental results for ultrasonic and electromagnetic wave based NDE.