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318 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
Structural Health Diagnostic Equipment
Mr. Ajinkya Sirsat*
Email: ajinkya_sirsat@yahoo.in
Have you ever build a palace out of playing cards? If yes, you would have ensured that there should be no draught
of air and vibrations in the vicinity of the palace so that your efforts would not go in vain. Also, while building if you notice a card with low strength or an area where you think there is more load to be balanced, you would provide extra card to support the load. Now, imagine you rebuild the same palace but this time with thick cardboards and with proper adhesive to keep everything in place. While building this time you become somewhat relaxed because it’s your experience, observations and understanding which tell you that the thick cardboard will sustain more load than the normal playing card. The effort would not go without reward. Thus, every engineer who
builds a structure wants his structure to serve the purpose it is built for that too for a longer duration. But as in the case of structure built out of cards it becomes difficult to comment about the failure of huge structures like skyscrapers, bridges, monuments, boilers, aeroplanes, and cranes just by looking at the structures.
The question then arises how to tell that a structure is going to fail in its functionality. To answer this let’s take a case which is related to the health of a person. A completely fit person is monitored daily to ensure that every organ in his body is working to its full potential. While monitoring the person one day isdiagnosedwithdiabetes.Thispersonisnow monitored regularly for his sugar level and is on medication so that the malfunctioning organs begin to function properly. To take the analogy
* Mr. Ajinkya Sirsat, PhD Scholar from Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, is pursuing his research on “Micro- Mechanic of Smart Composite Structures in Stochastic Framework”. His popular science story entitled “Structural Health Diagnostic Equipment” has been selected for AWSAR Award.
