Buffeting is an aeroelastic phenomenon which plagues high performance aircraft, especially those with twin vertical tails like the F/A-18, at high angles of attack. This buffeting is a concern from fatigue and inspection points of view. By means of wind-tunnel and flight tests, this phenomenon is well studied to the point that buffet loads can be estimated and fatigue life can be increased by s...

Smart materials that respond to a stimulus or their environment to produce a dynamic and reversible change in critical properties are in focus of actual research. [ 1 ] Among several stimuli, photochromism is receiving increasing attention because of its potential applications in molecular switching, lenses, and data storage among others. [ 2 ] In general, photochromic molecules can turn any co...

Animal hairs consisting of α-keratin biopolymers existing broadly in nature may be responsive to water for recovery to the innate shape from their fixed deformation, thus possess smart behavior, namely shape memory effect (SME). In this article, three typical animal hair fibers were first time investigated for their water-stimulated SME, and therefrom to identify the corresponding net-points an...

Significant levels of undesired vibration and noise are inherent in transport and combat vehicles, particularly in helicopters and propeller aircraft. Therefore, it is important to investigate techniques that reduce vibration and noise in the cabin to improve habitability, effectiveness, and safety for passengers. In addition, continuous exposure may lead to long-term physiological effects. In ...

The design of composite materials requires microstructurally based computational approaches to optimize the shape and the spatial arrangement of the constituents with respect to a sought-after effective property. This topic remains widely opened especially in the case of heterogeneous media which exhibit multifi eld couplings in their constitutive relations. Up to now, the numerical homogenizat...

The topology optimization method is used to find the distribution of material phases that extremizes an objective function (e.g., thermal expansion coefficient, piezoelectric coefficients etc) subject to constraints, such as elastic symmetry and volume fractions of the constituent phases, within a periodic base cell. The effective properties of the material structures are found using a numerica...

Undesired hysteresis and constitutive nonlinearities are present to varying degrees in all smart material based transducers when they are driven at high levels. This motivates the development of adaptive inverse compensation techniques that can approximately linearize the transducer response and also are sufficiently efficient to accommodate model uncertainties and the error introduced by inexa...

For nonlinear and adaptive control of smart structures direct and indirect neural network control strategies have been suggested. In indirect neural network control the identified plant models are usually implemented as black-box neural networks using no a priori knowledge. Designing a neural network for system identification using dimensional analysis results in neural networks, where in contr...

PAPER Joanna Aizenberg et al. Microbristle in gels: toward all-polymer reconfigurable hybrid surfaces EMERGING AREA Dmitry G. Shchukin et al. Application of smart organic nanocontainers in feedback active coatings www.softmatter.org We report on the fabrication of biologically-inspired ''smart'' surfaces using hybrid architectures comprising polymer microbristle embedded in a hydrogel layer. Th...