Mechanical, Civil and Petroleum Engineering: Advances in Sensors and Measurement Methods of Multi-Scale Systems

Dear Colleagues,

The analysis of complex systems often involves interdisciplinary collaborations of engineering and physical scientists from various backgrounds such as mechanical, civil, petroleum engineers, tribologists, earth scientists, and applied physicists. In an attempt to better understand the performance of engineering systems and provide optimum technical-economical solutions with minimum impact to the built and natural environment, enormous progress has been reported in experimental methods involving a wide range of scales, from non-distractive and distractive nano-to-microscale experimentation to the monitoring of large-scale systems which has simultaneously advanced various disciplines of science and engineering—for example, the rapid progresses in laboratory-based analysis of interfaces simulating, at a controlled environment, analogue fault movements and proppant–rock interactions, all the way to monitoring of large-scale problems such as granular flows, tunnels, or ground motion due to oil/gas production, and the multiscale analysis of the Mars and Lunar surfaces attempting to prepare humans for space explorations. These progresses have been highlighted especially over the last decade due to the significant reduction of natural resources, the urgent need to find environmentally friendly engineering solutions, and the global population increase which requires innovative solutions to be found in energy and land utilization.

This Special Issue serves as a platform to bring together engineering scientists, earth scientists, and physicists with the most recent advancements in experimentation, development of sensors, and instrumentation/monitoring methods in various areas which demand interdisciplinary collaborations and multiscale analyses, particularly in relation to natural resources, space exploration, and multiscale analyses of engineering systems, among others. Original contributions with newly developed methods and research outputs in the form of full-length papers, review articles with emphasis on state-of-the-art knowledge, and preliminary results/new ideas in experimentation which are promising for future research in the form of technical note/short communication are all welcome.

Topics of interest in this Special Issue include (but are not limited to) advances in sensors, laboratory setups, field measurement, and monitoring for: (i) natural resources; (ii) space exploration; (iii) land reclamation and ground treatment; (iv) structural health monitoring of engineering structures/systems; (v) multiscale laboratory testing (and physical model test) scaling down large-size engineering and natural systems; (vi) material characterization with emphasis in microstructure, surface, and interface mechanics and their role in the understanding of the behavior of large-scale problems; (vii) applications in offshore, marine, and ocean engineering/science; and (viii) image analysis techniques and AI applications.

Dr. Kostas Senetakis
Guest Editor

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