News

At the University of Minho, Carolina Melendez has reached the one-meter milestone between transmitter and receiver bender elements. This mark was made possible by the development of a signal amplification circuit by Marcos Martins and João Rocha. 

The amplification circuit is built around the PA96CE, a high-performance class A/B operational amplifier tailored for high-voltage and high-current applications. Engineered for robust performance, the circuit delivers up to 70 W of power output, supporting output voltages ranging from ±20 V to ±120 V and currents up to 1.2 A. It maintains a stable gain of 26 dB (G = 20 V/V) across frequencies up to 100 kHz, ensuring consistent and reliable operation.

The amped-up signal is an important milestone as we are getting the bender element testing setup ready to be installed in an experimental road in 2025.

We are pleased to announce that Hélder Silva, a Master's graduate in Civil Engineering, has joined BUILTCOLAB as part of the INTENT project team. Hélder will be responsible for the development of the cyber-physical system that will coordinate, collect, store, and make available a wide range of data gathered from the monitoring of an experimental section.

A journal article presenting a new Rowe cell equipped with bender elements was published by the Geotechnical Testing Journal .

Between 18th and 21st of June, the 7th International Conference on Geotechnical and Geophysical Site Characterization took place in Barcelona. The conference gathered experts and practitioners in the areas of geotechnical characterization, with special emphasis on in situ mechanical and geophysical testing tools and procedures.

On August, 26, 2024, Ionut Moldovan has delivered a presentation entitled "A modified Rowe cell with bender elements for dynamic testing of soils and interfaces" at the 18th European Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ECSMGE 2024).

On June, 3rd, 2024, Sandra Silva Pinto has delivered a presentation entitled "Hybrid-Trefftz Finite Elements for Non-Homogeneous Wave Propagation Problems" at the 9th European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering (ECCOMAS 2024).