Attendance of IABMAS 2016 at Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil

Hello everyone!

How have you been doing in this lovely summer? I hope to find you well.

Like I mentioned in my last message, in this post I will talk about my trip to Brazil for the attendance of the 8th International Conference on Bridge Maintenance, Safety and Management. 

This conference was held in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, from June 26-30 and organized by the International Association for Bridge Maintenance and Safety (IABMAS). This is one of the biggest bridge monitoring conferences in the world and is organized every two years being that the first was held precisely here in Barcelona in 2002.

Like the title of the conference suggests, its main objective is to bring together academics and practicing professionals related to bridge maintenance, safety, and management for the dissemination of the latest developments in this field. 

The city of Foz do Iguaçu, located in the southwest interior of Brazil (at the border with both Paraguay and Argentina) is characterized for being the place where the Paraná and Iguaçu river converge. Near to the meeting of this two rivers the Iguaçu Falls are located, listed as one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature, with a flow of up to 45 milion liters per second! And as you can see from the following picture, it's astonishing beautiful. 

Overall perspective of Iguaçu Falls (credits)

A very happy ESR in front of the falls

In this event I presented a paper developed under the TRUSS project with the title: "Monitoring of shear cracking in partially prestressed concrete beams by distributed optical fiber sensors".

Presenting at IABMAS 2016

This was an extremely enticing and productive conference where I got to interact and discuss with several researchers from all around the world about several advances and topics of studies related with the structural monitoring of bridges. The next IABMAS conference is going to be in Melbourne, Australia in July 2018 and the deadline for the submission of the abstracts is May 2017. Hopefully, I will be able to attend it with further developments of my project together with more of my ESR colleagues.  

Next month, I will talk about another conference that I attended in the beginning of this month at Bilbao, so please stay tuned.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this incredibly beautiful image of the new  European champions!!