UMaine Research Paper Wins Top Award From International Engineering Society

April 11, 2008
Contact: Tom Weber (207) 581-3777 

ORONO -- A research paper written by Rodrigo Silva-Muñoz, a University of Maine Ph.D candidate in civil and environmental engineering, won a first-place outstanding paper award for the upcoming 2008 international conference of the Society for the Advancement of Materials and Process Engineering (SAMPE).

"Monitoring of Marine Grade Composite Doubler-Plate Joints Using Embedded Fiber Optic Strain Sensors," co-authored by Roberto Lopez-Anido, an associate professor of civil engineering, reports on research done at UMaine’s Advanced Engineered Wood Composites Center into a new structural health monitoring system for U.S. Navy vessels.

Silva-Muñoz will deliver his paper, judged the best of 261 submitted, when he and Lopez-Anido attend the SAMPE ’08 conference, "Material and Process Innovations: Changing Our World," on May 21 in Long Beach, Calif. The paper will also be published in the Journal of Advanced Materials.

After receiving his doctoral degree at the end of this summer, Silva-Muñoz plans to return to his native Chile, where he will become a professor of civil engineering at the University of Concepciün.

Lopez-Anido and John Pierce Wise Sr., director of the Wise Laboratory of Environmental and Genetic Toxicology at the University of Southern Maine, were recently granted federal awards totaling nearly $1 million from the Defense Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR).

The money will help support Lopez-Anido’s research into the use of fracture-based failure criterion to analyze composite joints for Navy ship hulls. Wise will examine how the repair of depleted uranium-induced DNA strand breaks protects against carcinogenesis in human bronchial cells.