Design, Monitoring and Mitigation of Environment-Induced Failures in Aerospace and Mobility Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Aerospace and advanced mobility systems operate in often harsh, unpredictable, and rapidly evolving environments. Temperature extremes, humidity, icing, corrosion, UV radiation, particulate impacts, and other environmental stressors can severely degrade materials, compromise structural integrity, disrupt electronic systems, and ultimately jeopardize safety and performance. As aircraft, spacecraft, rotorcraft, autonomous vehicles, and emerging urban air mobility platforms expand their missions into more demanding domains, ranging from high-altitude flight to lunar exploration, their ability to anticipate, monitor, and mitigate environment-induced failures has become a critical engineering challenge.

This Special Issue brings together original research and comprehensive reviews addressing the design strategies, monitoring technologies, and mitigation approaches for enhancing system resilience against environmental hazards. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Advanced materials and coatings for corrosion, erosion, and icing protection;
• Structural health monitoring and predictive maintenance enabled by embedded sensors and digital twins;
• Failure mechanisms induced by thermal cycling, moisture ingress, UV exposure, or radiation.
• Modeling and simulation of multi-physics degradation processes;
• Adaptive design and control strategies to improve survivability and reliability in harsh operating conditions;
• Case studies and lessons learned from aerospace, automotive, maritime, and defense applications.

By highlighting both fundamental studies and applied solutions, this Special Issue will foster cross-disciplinary dialogue and accelerate the translation of cutting-edge research into robust engineering practices.

Dr. Carlo Giovanni Ferro
Dr. Stefano Valvano
Prof. Paolo Maggiore
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Aerospace is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• environment-induced failures
• aerospace structures and systems
• structural health monitoring (SHM)
• fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) and optical sensors
• digital twins and predictive maintenance
• icing and anti-/de-icing systems
• impact and foreign object damage (FOD)
• multiphysics modeling and simulation
• smart/adaptive materials and coatings
• reliability and lifecycle assessment
• failure analysis and mitigation strategies
• harsh environments (space, maritime, polar, desert)
• resilient design and adaptive control