Research
Research Fields @ i-MAPS
Acoustics and Ultrasonic Research
Research Interests
Ultrasonic NDE & SHM
Ultrasonic Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) are the key to ensure safety of the materials and structures, include Aerospace, Naval, Civil, Transportation and Military structures. After manufacturing, materials or structures must go through NDE for their respective certification for respective applications. With digitization and increasing demand of materials manufacturing is speeding up and thus NDE needs to keep up with the similar pace. Parallel to the concept of Factory 4.0, NDE 4.0 is realized with Robotic enabled autonomous NDE. i-MAPS explores in-situ NDE and Digital NDE that are key to the new generation high rate manufacturing. Dr. Banerjee has unique blend of autonomous process with Digital NDE pipeline that may support this demand. Some of these techniques include, Custom Robotics, Computational NDE (CNDE), Design for Inspection, Digital integration of autonomous data analysis, autonomous defect recognition with progressive failure analysis (PFA) through Artificial Intelligence (AI).
i-MAPS is funded by NASA in past 10 years and continuously getting funded to overcome the challenges associated with Ultrasonic NDE 4.0 . Please refer Dr. Banerjee's book on 'Computational Nondestructive Evaluation Handbook', published by CRC press in 2020, for more details.
Wave Propagation and Physics of Topology
Elastic wave propagation in solids and fluids is a fascinating subject with many intriguing physics that are still unknown. Under this research interest Dr. Banerjee explore waves in various engineered periodic media called Metamaterials, study absolute band gaps (BG), directional band gaps, quantum Hall trio effects on acoustic and elastic waves specially at the Dirac cones and Dirac-like cones, topological behaviors of waves, quantum analogous formulation of elastic waves, understanding spin effects on topology.
Dr. Banerjee is working on an upcoming book on this topic 'Metamaterials for Topological Acoustics' to be published in 2023.
Digital Twin for Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) & Structural Health Monitoring (SHM)
i-MAPS research explores Digital-Twin capability for NDE & SHM of Aerospace and Naval structures. This activity included localized sensor data processing (edge computing), intermediate data hybridization (fog computing), Machine learning (ML), development of artificial intelligence (AI) coupled with unique physics-driven predictive models, structural asset management.
Piezoelectric Materials and Applications
Dr. Banerjee's keen interest on innovative functionalities of piezoelectric material created several avenues of research interests, includes Energy Harvesting (EH) from ambient vibration, Point-of-Care (PoC) Biosensors for quick detection of disease or antibodies using Surface Acoustic Waves (SAW), Piezoelectric Transformers (PT) for voltage amplification and generation of Piezoelectric Plasma (PP), for diverse applications.