Abstract: The Italian Aerospace Research Centre is a state funded research centre located in Capua in the south of Italy. The centre was established in 1986 for implementing the National Aerospace Research Program (PRORA). This talk will provide an overview of the current research activities of the Innovative Material Laboratory, with special focus on the following topics:

• Mechanical Metamaterials. Current additive manufacturing techniques allow the fabrication of components with a prescribed microstructure, which can also include hierarchies and permits to attain performance that cannot be equalled by conventional materials. Specialised modelling tools are necessary for exploiting the potential of these metamaterials, and to understand their limitations. A non-linear numerical homogenization technique will be presented along with recent experimental tests on columns with regular octet microstructure manufactured in Ti-6Al-4V by Electron Beam Melting (EBM);
• Bayesian inference as a tool for structural mechanics problems. Bayesian inference is a well-known tool for statistical analysis and model testing that has proved to be very successful in many diverse fields. Alike all statistical methods it needs large dataset in order to be effective. Nevertheless, the computational power ordinarily available in modern computers, together with nested sampling techniques, allows the generation of optimized datasets that can be used for the solution of structural mechanics problems, such as the identification of material properties and shape selection. Differently from classical optimization techniques, Bayesian inference permits a thorough analysis of the problem’s phase-space, and provide greater confidence on the representativeness of the chosen solution. An example of the application of these techniques for the identification of the microstructure of a structural component, given limited, noisy, external information will be presented.