This year, Maestro team attended en masse the SMASIS (Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems) conference that took place at San Antonio, TX. The group consisted of Dr. Hartl, seven grad students, and Boeing Tech Fellow Jim Mabe. As the most important conference in the Adaptive Structures community, the team submitted and presented six conference proceedings (including an Invited Speaker session presented by Dr. Hartl). Furthermore, the team was involved with the yearly CASMART (Consortium of the Advancement of SHapep Memory Alloy Technology) where each member presented an overview of their research. Other activities included a high school STEM outreach event, networking with members of the community, and student competitions.
The highlight of the trip was when Dr. Hartl, Jacob Mingear, Brent Bielefeldt, Jessica Zamarripa, Alah Elwany (Industrial Engineering Department), and John Rohmer (currently at SIEMENS) were awarded the ‘Branch Ephrahim’ Garcia Best Paper for their work entitled ‘Towards High-Frequency Shape Memory Alloy Actuators Incorporating Liquid Metal Energy Circuits’. This is an award based on votes from members of ‘ASME Aerospace Division Adaptive Structures and Materials System’ for the most impactful paper of 2017.
