Majid Tabesh, a graduate student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering working under the advisement of Dr. James Boyd and Dr. Dimitris Lagoudas, was awarded first place in the SPIE/ASME 2014 Best Student Paper Presentation Competition. SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics, held its 21st international symposium on smart structures and materials and nondestructive evaluation and health monitoring (SPIE Smart Structures/NDE) in March 2014.
The award-winning paper, "Modeling size effect in the SMA response: a gradient theory," was presented at this conference in San Diego, CA. SPIE Smart Structures/NDE is a multidisciplinary conference devoted to energy harvesting, non-destructive evaluation (NDE), damage detection, structural health monitoring (SHM), dielectric elastomers, actuators, shape memory alloys and polymers, magnetorheological fluids, electroactive polymers (EAP), bioinspired and robotic systems, and smart materials, sensors, systems, and networks.
Majid's research is related to the understanding and modeling of the behavior of shape memory alloys (SMAs) at sub-micron scales. SMAs can be used as small-scale actuators in sensor applications for various industries such as bioengineering, aviation, and oil and gas. The Texas Institute for Intelligent Materials and Structures (TiiMS), as part of its effort on development and understanding of active materials, supported this research activity.
Nearly 120 papers were submitted toward this year's student paper competition at the SPIE Smart Structures/NDE conference. Six finalists were chosen for presentation at the competition based on their contribution to the field of smart structures and materials and advancement of the state-of-the-art. Of these finalists, Majid was selected by a panel of judges representing academia, industry, and national labs to have given the best overall technical presentation. Our congratulations to Majid for his great representation of Texas A&M and the Department of Aerospace Engineering.