Tuesday 7 August 2018

Attendance and presentation at IABMAS 2018 and 7WCSCM


Hey everybody!

How has this blistering summer been treating you? Hopefully not too bad.


Today I'm going to write about two great conferences that I was able to attend and present some of the latest findings of my project in the last month.

The first one was the 9th International Conference on Bridge Maintenance, Safety and Management (IABMAS 2018). This is a conference held every two years, that brings together some of the world's highest authorities in bridge monitoring and maintenance both from industry and academia. As some of you may recall, I had participated in the previous edition of this conference in Foz do Iguazu, Brazil back in June 2016 as I wrote about it in this blog post.

This time, this conference was held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in the amazing city of Melbourne, Australia between July 9-13.
General view of Melbourne
Bridge next to IABMAS 2018 venue

Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre

Opening ceremony at IABMAS 2018
In this conference, I had the chance to present a paper entitled "Performance analysis of distributed optical fiber bonding adhesives to concrete" where I described some results of a laboratory experiment conducted last winter in UPC's structural technology laboratory. 

Presenting at IABMAS 2018
This was a great event where I was able to get to know some of the most interesting and innovative research being conducted currently in the field of bridge monitoring and the people behind that research. For those of you interested in attending the next edition of IABMAS conference, it will be held in Sapporo, Japan between June 28 and July 3 of 2020.

The second conference was the 7th World Conference on Structural Control and Monitoring (7WCSCM) which was held between July 22-25 at the Shangri-La Hotel in Qingdao, China. This conference is held every four years and organized within the Internationa Association for Structural Control and Monitoring (IACSM). In fact, the last edition of this conference was held precisely in Barcelona in 2014.

Qingdao location in China (credits)
General view of Qingdao (credits)

Welcome reception of 7WCSCM

Conference dinner of 7WCSCM
In this conference, I was also able to present a conference paper, this time with the title: "Long-term reliability assessment of OBR based DOFS on reinforced concrete elements".

Presenting at 7WCSCM
Furthermore, this conference was held together with the APESS edition of this year which was held between Qingdao and Harbin in China. As some of you might recall, I had participated in last year's APESS at Yokohama National University in Japan as I described in this post, together with three of my fellow TRUSS ESRs. In this way, it was very pleasant to see several known faces and reconnect with them after this year.

Reconnecting with fellow participants of APESS 2017 at Qingdao, China
Finally, at this conference, I had the opportunity to visit together with all other participants of the 7WCSCM the Shandong High-speed Jiaozhou Bay Bridge which has a total of 41.58 Km among which 28.88 km are over water, being the longest cross sea-bridge in the world at the time of its opening back in 2011.

Shandong High-speed Jiaozhou Bay Bridge (credits)
As you might imagine, these were two great events that I really enjoyed and whose learnings and memories I will cherish for a long time.

This is all from me now, and stay tuned for more posts as I get close to the end of my project within TRUSS.

Cheers!