Thursday and Friday were two days of hard work to get good results for the student competitions and organize the final presentation. We divided the tasks based on each member strengths. Heekun worked on system identification for both problems using structural system identification (SSI). Alban and Chiara did system identification with the frequency domain decomposition (FDD) approach and identified damage in the frame with frequency decay, changes in insterstory drift and COMAC index. Junchang and Yi-Xiao helped with the design of the structural health monitoring systems. Paolo, Lefteris and I worked on the model updating of the pedestrian bridge using SAP2000 and MATLAB.
Saturday was the last day of the event, Joey found appropiate to play "Eye of the Tiger" as celebration for all the times we used the Borgia steps.
The 10 groups presented all the results of hard work during the past weeks. It was very interesting to see all the different approaches and strategies implemented to solve the same tasks assigned to everyone. People used different softwares and calculation methods for system identification, model updating and damage detection. Also, the design of the structural health monitoring systems were different in all the groups.
Afterwards, Dr. Vincenzo Gatulli made the final remarks of the summer school, it was a very successful event where we all learned a lot about smart structures, participated in experiments, made a lot of friends all around the world, discussed a lot about our research and we could see several beautiful places of the eternal city.
The winners of the Benedettini fellowships were announced as a recognition of outstanding students with proficiency in structural dynamics and health monitoring. Four students were chosen: Giacomo Bernagozzi, Alban Kita, Panagiotis Martakis and Antonello Ruccolo. Congratulations to all of them, specially my team lider Alban!
Then, we proceeded with the winner of the group student competition. There was some deliberation time but group 9 took second place and our group, The Fantastic 4!, was announced as the winner of this year APESS. Probably no one in our team believed it because it took a couple of seconds to realize it was really us. We were definitely very happy with the result. Unfortunately Paolo could not be there for the pictures because he had to leave on Thursday.
The summer school was officially over, everyone took pictures and said their goodbyes. It was definitely exciting and a gratifying experience.
In the afternoon some of us still had some time available and we took the oportunity to take a last walk around Rome. We visited the house of the Supreme Court, the Castle Sant'Angelo and the Vatican.
It was a great pleasure to meet and work with you, Alejandro.
Best regards,
Alban Kita