Wednesday 20 July 2016

Attendance of IABMAS 2016 at Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil

Hello everyone!

How have you been doing in this lovely summer? I hope to find you well.

Like I mentioned in my last message, in this post I will talk about my trip to Brazil for the attendance of the 8th International Conference on Bridge Maintenance, Safety and Management

This conference was held in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, from June 26-30 and organized by the International Association for Bridge Maintenance and Safety (IABMAS). This is one of the biggest bridge monitoring conferences in the world and is organized every two years being that the first was held precisely here in Barcelona in 2002.

Like the title of the conference suggests, its main objective is to bring together academics and practicing professionals related to bridge maintenance, safety, and management for the dissemination of the latest developments in this field. 

The city of Foz do Iguaçu, located in the southwest interior of Brazil (at the border with both Paraguay and Argentina) is characterized for being the place where the Paraná and Iguaçu river converge. Near to the meeting of this two rivers the Iguaçu Falls are located, listed as one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature, with a flow of up to 45 milion liters per second! And as you can see from the following picture, it's astonishing beautiful. 

Overall perspective of Iguaçu Falls (credits)
A very happy ESR in front of the falls

In this event I presented a paper developed under the TRUSS project with the title: "Monitoring of shear cracking in partially prestressed concrete beams by distributed optical fiber sensors".



Presenting at IABMAS 2016
This was an extremely enticing and productive conference where I got to interact and discuss with several researchers from all around the world about several advances and topics of studies related with the structural monitoring of bridges. The next IABMAS conference is going to be in Melbourne, Australia in July 2018 and the deadline for the submission of the abstracts is May 2017. Hopefully, I will be able to attend it with further developments of my project together with more of my ESR colleagues.  


Next month, I will talk about another conference that I attended in the beginning of this month at Bilbao, so please stay tuned.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this incredibly beautiful image of the new  European champions!!





Friday 1 July 2016

TRUSS annual plenary meeting at Santander

Hello everyone!

How is the beginning of the summer been treating you? I hope you all have been enjoying it.

As for me, like I said in my last post, this has been a busy but also productive period of my project. In addition, to the work that I've been developing at the UPC laboratory (which I intend to talk about in a future post), I've been attending different meetings and conferences, which gives me plenty to talk about here. In this way, I will speak about these different events in different posts in this blog, starting by describing to you the 2nd meeting of our TRUSS ITN research group.

This meeting took place at Santander, Spain on the 16th and 17th of June. For those of you who don't know this city, Santander is the capital of the autonomous community region of Cantabria located in the north of Spain. Here you can see a few pictures of it (all of them were downloaded from the website of Santander tourism department).





In this meeting, all the ESRs presented their progress on there respective projects followed by separate meetings of each ESR with a small group of experts, by the name of doctoral studies panel (DSP) meetings, which provided feedback on the personal career development plan (PCPD) of each ESR.


Furthermore, we were presented by the local organization with different and interesting networking activities. From a visit to a factory of nuclear plant components, to boat rides through the Santander bay and also a visit to a historical  village in this region.




This was a incredibly fun and enjoyable meeting where it was good to see the development of all my colleagues and engage in these activities with them. I must refer that unfortunately, our colleague ESR 13 Federico Perrotta was not able to attend this meeting and in this way, he was greatly missed by all of us. But as you can see from his blog his project is going just fine.

Currently, I'm writing this post from Foz do Iguaçu in the beautiful country of Brazil, where I'm attending IABMAS 2016 conference and where I presented an article related with my PhD project. Here you can see a small preview of my time here in Brazil, which I will talk about in my next post.



Stay tuned for further developments of my work and if you want to know more of the meetings and conferences that I'm attending!