I was fortunate to initiate my first three months secondment at Rijeka University's Faculty of Civil Engineering from 2 November 2022 to 2 February 2023. I worked under the supervision of Professor Gordan Jelenić and Assistant Professor Nina Čeh, and had the opportunity to have several interactions with PhD researchers and faculty members at URFCE.

I visited the advanced laboratories at the faculty of structural engineering at URFCE. The professor and technicians demonstrated me about the machinery and equipment. Gordan Jelenić and Nina Čeh have created a framework of objectives and tasks for my secondment.

I performed experiments for cantilever beam vibrations by using Quanser Shaking table machine and Optical measuring system. Various tests were carried out, and assessments were obtained by vibrating the slender beams with a shaking table and measuring the vibrations with two essential equipment:

• A high-speed, high-resolution advance camera to determine the deformed shape of the beam
• A laser displacement sensor fixed on the shaking table

The optical measuring system works so that it captured a series of photographs, which are later post-processed to obtain the displacements. For processing FEM software, I used which is provided by the same company: GOM Aramis or GOM Correlate.

The experimental results were compared to three models:

• Compared the frequencies of experimental measured stainless-steel beam with ABAQUS results and results were consistent.
• The same model in which the effect of the rotation of the cross sections is truncated, analytical, from a clear quadratic damping effect at low amplitude.

I learned the system's equipment, hardware, software facilities available at URFCE and data post processing. I also joined two PhD researchers and performed experimental tests on coal-formed steel frames. These experiments and knowledge assisted me in learning the fundamentals and gaining an understanding of the data that can be measured by doing experiments here. In addition, I adhere to webinars and tutorials on the GOM optical system YouTube channel.

In addition to my research activities, I also attended a doctoral seminar and had several opportunities to interact with other researchers in the group to exchange research ideas.

I visited the city, the beach, and various regional cuisines on the weekends. I am glad for this opportunity and for the URFCE members' warm welcome. I hope to return for the final conference, which will be held in September 2023, as well as for Researcher's Night.

I am thankful to the THREAD project for providing me such an enormous platform to enhance my abilities and offer top-notch knowledge in my field of research.

contributed by Muneer Ahmed (ESR 12)