Dear Colleagues,

Structural health monitoring of composite materials is a demanding task of great importance for the quality assessment and operational safety of manufactured goods. The need for improved time- and cost-effective solutions steers the scientific community towards two main drivers:

• The study of new experimental principles, technologies, testing procedures, and setup integrations for the measurement-based evaluation of bulk materials or complex structures, either to monitor/evaluate their production processes or to follow and check their structural integrity under working conditions;
• The development of new algorithms driven by artificial intelligence (machine learning, pattern recognition, representative learning, deep learning, etc.) for processing complex data to assess structural health.

This Special Issue invites original submissions addressing the structural health monitoring of composite materials through experimental techniques aimed at the autonomous detection and characterization of possible anomalies. Papers integrating different disciplines such as engineering, physics, mathematics, and computer science to produce consistent results of experimental evidence are particularly encouraged. Studies carried out in cooperation with enterprises or displaying the results of national and international projects having the goal of improving the sustainability of composite productions are welcome.

Dr. Roberto Marani
Dr. Davide Palumbo
Dr. Giuseppe Pitarresi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Materials is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Measurement principles and techniques for structural health monitoring:
  • Stress- and strain-based sensors;
  • Optical techniques including Shearography, DIC, and TSA;
  • Infrared NDT;
  • Ultrasonic testing, also with a focus on phased array ultrasonics;
  • 2D, 3D, multispectral, and hyperspectral imaging.
• Enhanced data analysis and integration:
  • Automatic defect detection and classification;
  • Feature selection for improved data processing;
  • Multisensor networks and corresponding data fusion;
  • Machine learning and deep learning from sensor data;
  • Digital twin for condition-based decision-making;
• Robots and manipulators for testing challenging components.