Cesar Sciammarella

In 2012 Cesar Sciammarella and his son Dr. Federico Sciammarella co-authored Experimental Mechanics of Solids, a comprehensive textbook of the techniques used in experimental mechanics.

Since 2005 Dr. Sciammarella has worked in cutting edge optical technology going beyond the Rayleigh limit that has traditionally been considered to be the maximum resolution that can be obtained in optics in far field observations. With the support of his co-workers he has succeeded in overcoming the Rayleigh limit. In recent work measurements in the far field have been carried out in nano crystals and nano spheres with accuracies on the order of ±3.3 nm.

His research is widely used for 3D reconstruction and stress and strain analysis. In his Doctoral Thesis on the Moiré method, he extended the Continuum Mechanics model originally developed by Dantu to large deformations. He developed fundamental equations on the properties of moiré fringes, signs conventions. He applied the moiré method to the solution of a plasticity problem. This was the first complete analysis of a non elastic problem with the moiré method. Dr Sciammarella generalised the concept of fringe order in methods that measure displacements using Fourier analysis in the process of formation of the fringe images. He proved formally that the orders could be represented by real numbers instead of integers, as was usual at the time of his publication. In 1966, he presented a full model of the moiré fringes as phase modulated signals and provided a method to get displacements and strains for moiré and photo-elastic fringes. He introduced in the literature the Fourier method as a tool for fringe pattern analysis. His model stands today as a standard model used in the fringe analysis method.

In 1962 he was invited to be Associate professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville. This is where he did some of his pioneering work on using the Moiré method and the Fourier method to analyse the contours and deformations of bodies. In 1967 he became professor at the Department of Aerospace and Applied Mechanics, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. It was during this period that Sciammarella pioneered digital analysis of moiré fringes with the use of computers. In 1985, he further developed this methodology by putting together an optics and computer system for fringe pattern analysis. Later he published a series papers answering the fundamental question of how far is it possible to recover fringe order information utilising computer analysis. This work culminated in the paper Heisenberg Principle Applied to the Analysis of Speckle Interferometry Fringes.

From 1952-57 Cesar was Professor of Physics at Argentine Army Engineering School. This was a period in Argentina under the democratically-elected Juan Domingo Perón. The coup that brought down Perón's difficult republic was aided by officers from Argentine Army Engineering School. Although Cesar was not involved in the coup he was detained and tortured during the uprising. Peron's government fell two weeks after his detention and he was able to escape during the confusion. He spent several months fighting pneumonia caused by his detention.

Cesar Sciammarella received his diploma in Civil Engineering from the University of Buenos Aires in July 1950. After graduation, he worked as a professional engineer in different industries and in different capacities, including the Director of the Materials Testing Laboratories in the Metallurgy and Materials Division of the Atomic Energy Commission of Argentina. Later, he was invited by Dr A.J. Durelli to come to the US to get a PhD degree. He received his Ph.D., from the Illinois Institute of Technology, in June 1960. Upon graduation, he returned to the Argentine Atomic Energy Commission.

Cesar Augusto Sciammarella (born August 22, 1924) is an Argentine civil engineer who made significant contributions to the field of experimental mechanics. In the last decade, he has extended his pioneering developments in moiré, holography, and speckle interferometry methodologies down to the nanometer level. These efforts have enabled optics to be applied beyond the classical Rayleigh limit, reaching the nanometre range, and allowed electron microscopy to reach resolutions of the order of atomic distances.