Synergic combinations of computational methods and experiments for structural diagnoses

The mechanical characterization of materials and the non-destructive assessment of possible damages in industrial plant components and in civil engineering structures and infrastructures is a problem which at present arises more and more frequently and acquires growing importance in both experimental and computational mechanics. The survey presented here concerns some representative, practically meaningful typical problems of this kind recently or currently tackled by our research team. It is intended to evidence the central role played by computer methods and by procedures of numerical mathematics, including soft computing, for the practical solutions of inverse analyses in real-life situations. The engineering applications dealt with herein concern steel pipelines and metal industrial components typical of the oil industry and existing large concrete dams possibly deteriorated by physico-chemical processes like alkali-silica reactions.