22 September, 2026
Prof. Gilles Lubineau, Director of the ENERCOMP Technology Consortium and Principal Investigator of the MCEM Lab at KAUST, participated in the 8th World Congress on Adhesion and Related Phenomena (WCARP VIII), held from 8–11 September 2026, where he delivered a plenary lecture entitled “Building Engineering Trust in Composite Bonded Joints: From Design to Inspection.”
The lecture addressed key challenges in ensuring the reliability of bonded joints throughout their lifecycle, from performance-driven design to advanced inspection technologies.
Prof. Lubineau discussed emerging strategies for improving the damage tolerance of adhesive joints by engineering interfaces with intrinsic crack-arrest functionalities, including approaches based on tailoring the interface resistance curve through nonlocal dissipative mechanisms.
The lecture also highlighted recent research on inspection technologies for bonded bell-and-spigot joints in non-metallic pipelines. This work is being advanced through a consortium sponsored by Saudi Aramco and KAUST, with the goal of developing reliable inspection solutions to support the wider deployment of non-metallic pipeline systems in the oil and gas industry.
The presentation showcased ongoing research at KAUST aimed at strengthening confidence in composite bonded structures through advances in design, damage tolerance, and inspection.