International Journal of Smart and Nano Materials

ISSN: 1947-5411 (Print) 1947-542X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsnm20

Smart structures, materials and nano technology

in engineering

Ayech Benjeddou

To cite this article: Ayech Benjeddou (2018) Smart structures, materials and nano
technology in engineering, International Journal of Smart and Nano Materials, 9:2, 85-87, DOI:
10.1080/19475411.2018.1463938

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19475411.2018.1463938

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.

Published online: 30 Apr 2018.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SMART AND NANO MATERIALS, 2018
VOL. 9, NO. 2, 85–87
https://doi.org/10.1080/19475411.2018.1463938

EDITORIAL

Smart structures, materials and nano technology in

engineering

Smart materials are active materials that are nowadays commonly used for sensing,
actuation, and transduction for structural noise (acoustic), shape (morphing) and vibra-
tion control and health monitoring of (in historical order) offshore petroleum, aerospace,
aeronautic, mechanical, civil (including infra-structures and wind turbines) and biome-
dical engineering. More recently, they were also used for energy harvesting from
environment for autonomously and wirelessly powering of various temperature or
pressure monitoring sensors and some medical (fluidic) implants and (surgery) devices.
When surface bonded on- or embedded into-passive structures, smart materials provide
them with additional active functionalities such as autonomously, wirelessly and self-
reacting to their deformation or stress states and surrounding environment; thus,
rendering them smart structures. On the other hand, nano materials, having characteristic
dimensions of less than 100 nm and that are nowadays available in particles, short or
long fibres, tubes, platelets, or thin films forms, were developed for enhancing passive
structural materials performance; for example, for increasing their thermal and electrical
conductivities or/and their mechanical (mainly elastic) resistance or stiffness. They were
mostly used as reinforcements of such materials. While the nanotechnology in engineer-
ing is being developed mostly independently from smart materials, a recent growing
tendency is to combine nano and smart materials in order to enhance synergistically the
resulting smart structures performance and reach new designs or/and applications. This
is, for example, the main aim of the present International Journal for Smart and Nano
Materials (IJSNM), and of joining the series of International Conference on Smart Materials
and Nanotechnology in Engineering (SMN) with that of International Conference on Smart
Materials and Structures (CANSMART) in 2015, or with that of the ECCOMAS Thematic
Conference on Smart Structures and Materials (SMART) in 2017. By merging such events,
cross-fertilization of multidisciplinary – driven inspiration ideas and multi-research com-
munities’ cross-dialogue are reached.
The present IJSNM special issue spans volume 9's issue 1 [1-4] and issue 2 [5-8]; it contains
8 papers [1-8] that were extended and revised (some of them twice) according to 3
anonymous and independent peer reviewers’ reports. They were spontaneously submitted
following an open call to the participants of the joint 8th SMART and 6th SMN held in Madrid
(Spain) from 5 to 8 June 2017. The latter attracted 250 submissions from 36 countries
representing 5 continents, among which 220 ones were presented in 7 plenary lectures (PL),
4 keynote lectures (KL), 16 mini-symposia (MS) that were organized by experts in their
related research fields, 1 special session (SS), 3 general sessions (GS) and 1 Poster session [9].
This major event, in the joined fields of ‘smart structures, materials and nano technology in
engineering’, was supported by several academic and research institutions as well as by
industrial companies and research centres. It was closed by a technical visit to a ‘design and

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
86 A. BENJEDDOU

manufacturing of aero-structures and components’ supplier of renowned international

(multi-national) aircraft manufacturers. Hereafter are briefly described the 8 papers of the
present IJSNM special issue spanning volume 9's issue 1 [1-4] and issue 2 [5-8].
The first paper [1] was presented in ‘MS07: Advanced finite element models for smart
structures’; it provides an electromechanical analysis of composite and sandwich multi-
layered structures by shell elements with node-dependent kinematics. The second one
[2], presented in ‘MS05: Multifunctional structures with integrated piezoelectric elements’,
introduces the Ritz sub-laminate generalized unified formulation approach for piezo-
electric composite plates. The third contribution [3], presented in ‘SS: CRC/TR 39 PT-
PIESA project’ on lightweight design by integrating functions addresses, numerically and
experimentally, the monitoring concept for structural integration of PZT fibre arrays in
metal sheets. The fourth contribution [4] is a focused review on the less known and
investigated research topic of field-dependent nonlinear piezoelectricity. While the 5th
paper [5], on finite element analysis scattering of surface acoustic wave (SAW) bandpass
filter on Barium Titanate thin film in cubic phase, was not presented in SMART/SMN
2017, it represents well its ‘MS10: SAW passive and wireless sensors for structural health
monitoring applications’. Beside above SS and MS05, the tendency of embedding smart
materials, instead of classically surface-bonding them on host structures, was the focus
of ‘GS2: Embedded smart materials technology’ which sample representative is the 6th
contribution [6] on the temperature and strain registration by fibre optic strain sensor in
the polymer composite materials manufacturing. The 7th paper [7], presented in above
MS05, describes an approach to determine shunt circuits parameters for vibration
damping. The last (8th) contribution [8] is a sample of the synergy between SMART
and SMN joined events as it discusses morphology- and ion-size induced actuation of
Carbon Nano Tube (CNT) architectures.
As can be noticed from the previous section, this issue presents few smart and nano
materials behaviour and response for smart structures and nanotechnology in engineering
applications. We hope that this ‘picture’ from SMART and SMN 2017 brings new knowledge
and ideas to their respective research communities and contributes to open minds and
widen research interests of IJSNM readers. As a closure, we are very thankful to the authors
for their very interesting contributions and to the reviewers for their meticulous reports.
Besides, the organizers of SMART and SMN 2017 are very thankful to the editor-in-chief,
Professor Jinsong Leng, and to the publisher, Sage Publications, for their supports to these
events by dedicating the present special issue (spanning volume 9's issue 1 [1-4] and issue 2
[5-8]) to sample contributions from those presented therein and by publishing it in open
access format with weaved Articles Processing Charges (APC).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References
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 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SMART AND NANO MATERIALS 87

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Ayech Benjeddou
ROBERVAL, Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC) – Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Compiègne, France
Institut Supérieur de Mécanique de Paris (SUPMECA), Saint Ouen, France
benjeddou@supmeca.fr
Accepted 10 April 2018