Strengthening and Upholding the Performances of the new Engineered Research PANELS

Panels are ubiquitous components of engineering structures such as cars, aircraft, boats and buildings. The panels often dominate the overall performance of such structures, whether in terms of noise transmission and radiation, vibration, stability, stiffness or strength. A great deal of effort has been spent in the mechanical engineering fields in order to conceive new panels with improved static and dynamic performances. This is motivated primarily by the search for innovative design solutions specifically tailored for facing the problems of transportation engineering, where the vehicle requires a design with high stiffness, low weight, low noise and low cost. The SUPER✯PANELS project will coordinate five different international research groups with high levels of expertise in panel analysis and activities in the fields of automotive, aerospace, naval and railway transportation. The process of exchanging researchers and coordinating activities will allow the specific expertise of each group to be enhanced, enabling improved and faster selection and development of novel panels, configurations and materials. The range of properties and constructions of existing panels is very large and numerous opportunities are offered by new technologies. However, knowledge of the behaviour of the panels is still limited and requires research actions to allow them to become applicable in general engineering. Furthermore, from the consortium members’ previous activities, there are innovative methods that have been developed over recent years, arising from an increase of the knowledge about predictive structural and structural-acoustic tools. These are contributing to major advances and will enter common engineering practice in the near future. In this project these novel methods will be extensively used, tested and verified against specific measurements of the predicted and expected performances of the (super)panels. Several candidate solutions will be suggested and motivated at the beginning of the project. The results will qualify how and where the specific performances have been increased without penalties for any of the other standard requirements. The main attention will be devoted to assurance of the compliance with the static requirements and to improvement of the dynamic and vibro-acoustic performances. Other emerging requirements as the flammability will be also investigated. This project has been promoted thanks to existing relationships and contacts between the five entities, as later reported. The beneficiaries are located in Italy, United Kingdom and Belgium; the partners’ organisations are in Canada and New Zealand. Departments belonging to the engineering faculties form the group: they refer generally to the mechanical and aerospace fields. In some cases, there were strong collaborations that in the past have already allowed some exchanges, but the aim of SUPER✯PANELS is to bring together all the expertises, the laboratories and the specific skills in one common platform. The project IRSES will benefit the organisations, bringing them together under a common umbrella, joining their previous research experiences and consolidating the previous occasional collaborations. The researchers’ secondments will accelerate the process of achieving engineering results, since it is well known that cross-fertilisation among distinct but complementary expertises has a dramatically positive effect in selecting the best method and/or technologies. Not surprisingly, as later detailed, this exchange project would link complementary experiences in the civil and transportation engineering fields: the researchers involved would participate in a relatively short time in a wider group having several different perspectives of the same macro problem. These latter cannot all be investigated with the same levels of detail, but will furnish a general common framework in which all the design requirements can be properly allocated. Table 1 presents the beneficiaries and the partners organisations. Each of the beneficiaries/partners has a widely acknowledged reputation on an international scale. They all work in the generic field of mechanical and transportation engineering. Table 1: Beneficiaries and Partners organisations 1 ælab / vibrations and acoustics group Aerospace Engineering University of Naples “Federico II” Napoli, Italy 2 Dynamics Group Institute of Sound and Vibration Research University of Southampton Southampton, U.K. 3 Noise and Vibration Research Group Mechanical Engineering Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Leuven, Belgium 4 Vibrations and Fluid-Structure Interaction Mechanical Engineering McGill University Montreal, Canada 5 Centre for Advanced Composite Materials, Mechanical Engineering University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand The histories, traditions and backgrounds are different: SUPER✯PANELS is an extraordinary opportunity to share these differences and transform them in a cooperative and stable scenario. In the next sections the aims and the role of each partner will be detailed inside the whole framework of the research project.