Institute Goals

     Damage prognosis is the prediction in near real-time of the remaining useful life of an engineered system given the measurement and assessment of its current damaged (or aged) state and accompanying predicted performance in anticipated future loading environments. As interpreted here, damage prognosis incorporates hardware, software, modeling and analysis in support of prediction. A key element in damage prognosis is obviously that of structural health monitoring (SHM). However, on like SHM, damage prognosis requires a model of the systems failure modes such as fatigue, cracking, etc. In addition, damage prognosis is keenly tied to the hardware required to make current measurements of key parameters in these models. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the Damage Prognosis solutions, a Pan American Advanced Studies Institute in Damage Prognosis was held in Florianopolis, Brazil at the Praiatur Hotel. The institute was by invitation only and consisted of a mix of researchers from the Americas in each of the fundamental disciplines underling solutions of damage prognosis problems. In addition, a group of lectures addressed applications. Thirty advanced students who participated (15 from the US, 13 from Brazil, one from Argentina and one from Chile) took an active role in the learning of and the development of the Damage Prognosis discipline. The students’ goal during the workshop was to solve a damage prognosis problem given at the beginning of the workshop and to identify research problems that needed solving to carry the discipline forward. The student groups each made a presentation on the last day, and their slides can be found in the following section “Slides of Lectures”.