Intelligent Structural Health Management of Aerospace, Mechanical and Civil Structures

8/10/09

At IIT Madras our group was to stay at the Taramani Guest house, a sort of campus motel where professors regularly stayed for short visits. The Taramani guest house was a elegant building that seems pretty new. It has a dining hall where it serves great Indian food buffet style, air-conditioned rooms, and plenty of space. There's also a laundry service and coffee service with a small fee. The surprising thing about it, at least to us, is how open the building is. It seems halfway between a hotel and a motel where each unit opens to the outside. This would be ordinary, except that you frequently find monkeys(!!!) playing in the hallways and climbing all over the building and the surrounding trees. Also the building is covered in insects of all different shapes and sizes, and because of this, has a small city of geckos who feed off of these insects. Also it was not strange at all to see a herd (4-8) small deer wandering around the yard in the house, some with incredibly impressive antlers.

It was time to do some work, since IIT Madras started school today, letting us in to the facilities we need to get to and letting us meet the people we wanted. We met with Professor Krishnan Balasubramaniam, who was probably one of the nicest and most accommodating hosts I have ever met. We discussed our project, what we thought of India so far, my strange illness, and many other topics with friendly gusto. A little while later, Professor Sridhar Krishnaswamy, The Boss, showed up and joined in with our conversation and we pounded out some of the details of what we would be doing over the next 3 weeks.

We all took a tour of the NDE facilities in the Machine Design building, and we met some of the graduate students and other professors who work there. Among those we met was Professor Raghu Prakash, who was to help us tremendously with our project over the next few weeks. It was determined that we would not be able to use flash thermography, since the thermal camera was not available for our use, but we could, however, use the MTS and do fatigue testing of the NU Cu steel.

8/11/09

Today we went in to work around 9:30, as before, and Professor Krishnan had us undergraduates learn a little bit about what research was being done in the department and methods used for NDE in the field.

We got a short presentation about GPR, or Ground Penetrating Radar, which can be used to determine the location of supports in concrete, and is also used to monitor the health of roads. We also got a short presentation about ultrasonic NDE, where sound waves are used to determine structural weaknesses in materials. We then took a look at the machine shop and the facilities we were to use for the next several weeks, including the MTS room that we would spend a disproportionate amount of time in while in India.