Professor Jerome Connor and Simon Laflamme Ph.D. ’11, working with physicists at the University of Potsdam in Germany, recently proposed a new method for the electronic, continual monitoring of structures. In papers appearing in Structural Control Health Monitoring (December 2010) and the Journal of Materials Chemistry (April 2011) the researchers describe how a flexible skin-like fabric with electrical properties could be adhered to areas of structures where cracks are likely to appear, such as the underside of a bridge, and detect cracks when they occur. Installing this “sensing skin” would be as simple as gluing it to the surface of a structure in the length and width required. Read a news release.