Structural Health Monitoring is a relatively new science, but it's actually pretty cool.
In times past, complex parts for machines would be replaced according to a best guess, based on statistics. It's kind of like, "Your car has 75,000 miles on it, you should replace the shocks." Your shocks may be perfectly good, or they may have been shot at 50,000 miles.
Now, it's possible through structural health monitoring to place sensors of various types to actually measure when a part is going to fail, then replace it just before it does. This saves a lot of money, since only "bad" parts are replaced. This is why the Ben Franklin Center of Excellence has teamed up with Penn State to fund new projects.
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