Manolis Chatzis

Professor Manolis Chatzis graduated from the National Technical University of Athens in 2007 with a Diploma in Civil Engineering and obtained an MSc from NTUA in Structural Engineering in 2008. He then joined Columbia University in the City of New York, where he completed his PhD in the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics in 2012, under the supervision of Professor Andrew Smyth, successfully defending his thesis “The Dynamics of Rigid Bodies on Moving Deformable Media”.

Manolis continued in Columbia as a Post Doctoral Research Scientist working on “System Identification and data fusion”. He was appointed an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science and a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford in 2013.

Manolis' work is focused on the study of Dynamic Systems that exhibit Non-Linearities. Within that framework, the directions of modelling, testing, identifying and mitigating the response of such systems are of interest. Current areas of research include:

Structural Health Monitoring and Vibration Monitoring

Structural Health Monitoring aims at inferring the properties of a system, and detecting the presence of damage, by placing sensors and measuring some of its dynamic responses. To decide on the sensors to be used in an experimental campaign, the study of the observability properties of a system are of paramount importance. Equally, important is the robustness of the System Identification algorithms used to extract the properties and unmeasured responses/excitations from the measured dynamic signals. My group’s work focuses on extending and improving observability and identification algorithms. Examples of applications of interest to infrastructure elements comprise the monitoring of bridges, wind turbines and buildings. An adjoint direction of interest is that of vibration monitoring for museum exhibits.

Modeling Non-Linear Dynamic Systems

We focus on modelling the response of systems with contact and frictional interfaces, and elements containing damage subjected to dynamic excitations. A significant focus within this direction is to accurately model and quantify the risk for rocking components. Both structural systems, e.g. a bridge on a bearing joint, and non-structural, such as museum exhibits are of interest This direction further deals with estimating the risk of systems and proposing suggestions to mitigate it. Various sources of dynamic excitations are considered, such as earthquake excitations, wind and traffic loads, as well as human-induced vibrations.

The previous modelling directions are validated and tested using monitored data from field applications and also generating data in the lab. The group has an interest in design experiments that involve the hydraulic actuators and electric biaxial shake table of the Structural Dynamics Lab. A recent direction of interest is that of developing efficient algorithms and frameworks for the Real-Time Hybrid Testing and Identification of components.