Tutorials
Expand your expertise with SAMPE 2026 Tutorials. These immersive, three-hour courses give attendees a focused, hands-on experience in a single area of advanced materials or processes. Designed to establish a strong foundation, tutorials enhance understanding and prepare participants to fully engage with the conference’s technical sessions, panels, and exhibits.
Offered on Monday only, they give you a head start on all the knowledge and practical skills you will learn throughout the conference.
Artificial Intelligence and the Composites Product Lifecycle
Instructors: Dr. Navid Zobeiry & Dr. Anoush Poursartip
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming every stage of composites engineering, from materials development to manufacturing optimization and lifecycle performance. In this tutorial, attendees will gain a clear, practical understanding of today’s most relevant AI methods, including machine learning models, physics-informed techniques, surrogate modeling, optimization methods, and uncertainty quantification. Through accessible explanations and real-world case studies, this session demonstrates how AI can shorten development cycles, reduce testing costs, enhance quality assurance, and enable predictive maintenance and digital twins.
Participants will also explore the challenges that come with responsible AI integration, including data scarcity, noise and bias, scaling from laboratory to production, and validation frameworks necessary for certification. The tutorial concludes with a balanced look at regulatory, safety, cybersecurity, and ethical considerations. Attendees will leave with a grounded, actionable view of where AI truly adds value, and how to implement it effectively across the composites product lifecycle.
Structural Adhesive Bonding Materials & Processes
Instructor: Dan Ruffner
Structural adhesive bonding remains one of the most powerful (yet often misunderstood) enabling technologies in composite structures. This tutorial provides a clear and highly practical exploration of how bonded systems actually work, why they fail, and what it takes to achieve consistent high-performance results. Participants will examine the full bond system, including adherend surfaces, adhesives, surface preparation, primers, and the interphase region that forms between layers. Special attention is given to key concepts such as wet-out behavior, viscosity effects, application-window tradeoffs, and the influence of the "weakest component" on total system capability.
Through decades of hands-on manufacturing and engineering experience, the instructor demystifies the physics, materials interactions, and process variables inside a bond line barely seven-thousandths of an inch thick, revealing why successful bonding requires rigorous coordination across development, manufacturing, and fielding. This tutorial is ideal for engineers looking to improve reliability, prevent failures, and elevate their understanding of adhesive bonding from fundamental principles to real-world application.
Ceramic Matrix Composites
Instructor: Dr. Gregory N. Morscher
Ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) have rapidly transitioned from research materials to critical enablers of modern high-temperature aerospace systems. This tutorial provides a comprehensive introduction to the unique properties, behaviors, and design considerations that distinguish CMCs from traditional metallic solutions such as Ni-based superalloys. Attendees will learn foundational CMC classifications, processing approaches, and key mechanical performance characteristics that determine suitability for hot-section engine applications and other extreme environments.
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The session then examines the high-temperature performance challenges such as creep rupture, stressed-oxidation behavior, and the essential role of coatings in ensuring structural reliability. Design implications, spanning thermal management, life prediction, and architecture selection, are discussed in the context of real-world development pathways. Led by a leading expert with more than thirty years of CMC research, testing, and government/industry program experience, this tutorial equips participants with the insight needed to evaluate and apply CMCs in next-generation aerospace systems.
