Featured Faculty
Wael Abdel-Samad
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Wael Abdel-Samad is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering division at RIT’s campus in Dubai. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2013 and his research interests lie in the fields of Hybrid Experimental Mechanics and Nondestructive Testing (NDT).
Motivated by the need for full-field experimental techniques for the stress analysis of perforated structures, Abdel-Samad’s research combines analytical principles of elasticity with experimental techniques to analyze and better understand complicated structural problems. More specifically, his research efforts to date have focused on investigating and determining the full-field state of stress of perforated structures having unknown loading condition through hybridizing a variety of different NDT approaches. Such approaches include thermoelastic stress analysis, photoelastic stress analysis, and more recently digital image correlation (DIC).
Abdel-Samad’s latest research project was a collaborative one done on a perforated asymmetrical cooling vehicle structure utilizing DIC. The major advantage of this work was the ability to achieve full-field stress information when only a single component of displacement was physically measured. He is set to present the findings from this research project at the Society of Experimental Mechanics’ upcoming annual conference in June 2015 in Costa Mesa, CA where he will also be serving as a chair of the Infrared Imaging session. Abdel-Samad and his collaborators are currently working on applying similar concepts of hybrid mechanics to unsymmetrically loaded mechanical fasteners in an effort to achieve a full-field separation of thermoelastic stresses at the complex contact region.
More recently, and along with other colleagues from RIT – Dubai, Abdel-Samad was awarded a grant from Emirates Global Aluminum, UAE to apply his work on nondestructive testing and evaluation to monitor corrosion levels in aluminum casting facilities; corrosion being a typical problem in such environments as a result of the continuous swing in the cooling water chemistry.