Preface:Educating Engineers About Intelligent Material Systems and Structures

摘要

On occasion, the Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures has published papers on educational and pedagogical initiatives that are ongoing in our community (Scheer and Andrade, 1995). Moreover, there have been a number of papers focusing on education in other journals as well, including the fields of magnetorheological fluids (Wereley and Kamath, 1997), and structural health monitoring (Pines and Lovell, 1998). Our community often identifies itself as adaptive structures and materials systems, or smart structures and materials, or intelligent material systems and structures. In this issue, two manuscripts focused on education are published that describe how adaptive or smart or intelligent structures can be used in the classroom to illustrate beam dynamics, as well as the behavior of a more complex truss structure. A collection of such experiments, if it were available to the academic community, might lead to a more comprehensive approach to education of the systems integration aspects, including integration of sensors, actuators, and controllers into an adaptive structure.