Soheil Sadeghi Eshkevari, a structural engineering Ph.D. candidate, was recently awarded the 2019 Dominick J. DeMichele Scholarship from the Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM).
The award is given to first-time presenters attending the International Modal Analysis Conference (IMAC), a conference and exhibition that focuses on structural dynamics as well as technical advancements supporting the field.
“This is a major achievement for Soheil,” says Dr. Shamim Pakzad, Sadeghi Eshkevari’s advisor and an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, “as the award is the premier distinction for a student working in his area of research, and recipients are chosen from a large, international pool of applicants in civil, mechanical, and aerospace engineering.”
Sadeghi Eshkevari will attend IMAC, January 28–31, in Orlando, and present his work with Pakzad, entitled “Signal Reconstruction from Mobile Sensors Network using Matrix Completion Approach.”
His research centers on developing scalable solutions for bridge health monitoring using abundant smartphone data.
“The ultimate objective of this research would allow for large-scale implementations where the structural condition assessment of bridges could be monitored in real-time without any dedicated sensing devices,” says Sadeghi Eshkevari. “Your everyday smartphones would collect and transmit the data and we can potentially use it for bridge structural health monitoring. The data is there for free.”
This avenue of investigation explores one of the many crossroads between the physical and cyber infrastructures that buttress modern society. Pakzad is affiliated with Lehigh University’s newly formed Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy, which brings together faculty from across disciplines to research and develop multifaceted solutions to today’s most complex challenges.
Sadeghi Eshkevari’s earlier research investigated the effect of vehicle suspension dynamics on smartphones’ vibration readings. He and other students in the Pakzad research group have also recently developed a robust algorithm to identify fully the modal characteristics of an existing bridge using randomly collected mobile sensors’ data.
Sadeghi Eshkevari received his master’s degree in structural engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Iran. His master’s thesis was on developing a novel steel component compatible with steel plate shear walls to enhance its dynamic performance and distribute nonlinearities uniformly within the structure. He also worked as a structural engineer for three years at Rah-Pooyan engineering firm in Iran and was involved in design of multiple tunnels and bridges.
The SEM scholarship memorializes IMAC’s longtime director Dick DeMichele and his efforts to engage students studying the experimental mechanics disciplines in the conference.
