Recent work of
Thomas Schuster from Saarland University, Germany,
(joint with Arne Wöstehoff) paves the way to self-diagnosing airplanes.
The idea is to equip the aircraft with vibration sources and sensors.
Cracks and other defects can be detected by sending vibrations along the plane,
and measuring the response at the sensors.
Prof. Schuster's plenary talk at AIP will be about vector tomography,
which allows new imaging techniques in the fields of medicine, industry,
oceanography, plasma physics, polarization tomography and electron microscopy.