May 2023 Meetup

Dr. Pablo Tarazaga, Texas A&M University Professor and Associate Department Head of Research and Strategic Initiatives, Mechanical Engineering :: Talking to your building. A novel way of human-structure interactions

As we push the boundaries of our engineering systems we are demanding more and more of our scientific and engineering capabilities. To meet demands such as increased energy efficiency, and increased performance we find ourselves needing to develop systems that are highly accurate, that have new adaptable capabilities and are very well informed of themselves and their surroundings. This challenges our conventional approach to problem solving, which is producing a very exciting and creative time for our field. To this end we explore the most instrumented public building in the world for vibrations to carry out cutting edge research by challenging our conventional thinking of buildings and their human interaction.

I will discuss the main points of the instrumentation endeavor of the Goodwin Hall at Virginia Tech. A multi-year endeavor I directed, created to develop a multidisciplinary test bed for a myriad of topics, such as: human localization, tracking and classification, structural modeling and validation, security and threat detection and energy efficient building systems. We will delve into a few of these topics in more detail, in particular the problem of human tracking and classification (i.e., gender) and gunshot detection and classification.

Dr. Tarazaga is a professor in the J Mike Walker ‘66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M. He is also Associate Department Head of Research and Strategic Initiatives and director of the Fusion of Analysis, Simulation and Testing (FAST) Lab.

Dr. Tarazaga’s efforts concentrate in the areas of structural vibration. His expertise has focused in areas such as: the creation of net wave propagation of finite structures with no reflection, modeling of multi-physics systems, large scale instrumentation, signal processing and smart material applications. His work has been applied to the railroad industry, smart buildings, bio inspired cochlear sensors, high energy laser weapon systems and to improve the cybersecurity of additive manufactured parts.