Grupo de Estruturas Aeronáuticas (EESC - USP)

The Group of Aeronautical Structures, or GEA (from the portuguese acronym for Grupo de Estruturas Aeronáuticas), is a research body part of São Carlos School of Engineering, University of São Paulo (EESC/USP), linked to the Graduate Program in Mechanical Engineering (Programa de Pós Graduação em Engenharia Mecânica – PPGEM), that focuses on expanding the understanding of materials science and structural analyses mainly for the field of Aeronautical Engineering. Past publications of the group have explored topics such as Composite Materials and Structures, Structural Health Monitoring, Biopolymers, Piezoelectric components analyses, Metallic Alloys, Fatigue and Damage Propagation. GEA’s primary goal is to empower undergraduate and graduate students to use computational and experimental tools in order to project and analyse aeronautical structures, focusing in metal and/or composite based structures. Thus, the group is grounded in experiments to develop and validate mathematical material models, known as constitutive models. These models are implemented and further used alongside finite element formulations to predict the behavior of aeronautical structures. At last, the computational predictions are compared with experimental results, and the limitations and potentialities of the developed models, mainly in failure prediction of composites, can be assessed. Furthermore, these models are also used as a background for the development of piezoelectric-based structural health monitoring (SHM) systems.