Strain Measurements on Flexible Pipeline Systems

Monitoring volcano activity is an important issue in the mitigation of natural hazards. Recently, most fatal issues occurred on volcanoes with low-energy and moderate activity, making them attractive touristic places (e.g., the 2014 Mount Ontake eruption in Japan). For these types of volcanoes, monitoring involves multiphysics measurements on dense networks. Distributed networks of sensors must be easily adapted to the volcano’s evolving state and the appearance of new active areas like fumaroles or high heat flux in the soil.

The Vasa Museum in Stockholm houses Vasa, a 17th-century Swedish warship raised from the seabed in 1961. Almost completely preserved, she is both a cultural icon and a full-scale research platform for naval architecture, materials science, and maritime archaeology. But preserving a 400-year-old oak hull on land poses a critical structural challenge: without buoyancy, the ship’s weight is carried through discrete support points, and slow deformation has already been detected. To protect Vasa for future generations, the museum is replacing the original display cradle with an adjustable steel support system equipped with a real-time force monitoring and long-term structural health monitoring (SHM) solution.

The break-up into the new era of Internet of Things (IoT), industry 4.0 or cloud computing takes an impressive pace and is also in several industrial applications irresistible. The industry with its huge amount of machines and components of divers size, value and function is faced by one big challenge: data from all these assets needs to be gathered and analyzed.

From October 24 -26 the Space Tech Expo and Conference took place in Bremen, Germany. The Space Tech is Europe’s meeting place for space business, Technology and innovation.