 It is a great pleasure to host Prof. Venkataraman Thangadurai, Chair in Energy at the School of Chemistry, University of St Andrews for the MMRG Seminar held on Friday, April 11th, at 4:00 pm in JWS 427a.
Seminar Title: Solid-State Batteries for Energy Storage Applications Description: Renewable energy sources are critical for decreasing the growing greenhouse gas emissions. They play a vital role in the transition to a decarbonized economy. Because renewable sources such as solar and wind are intermittent, reliable energy storage and conversion systems are crucial for their utilization. Electrochemical devices can be implemented to directly store and convert energy from renewable sources for a wide range of applications Solid state metal batteries can accelerate electrification in both transport and peak shaving applications. In this talk, next generation solid-state membranes and electrodes for safe, high-energy density and robust batteries will be presented. About the Speaker: Dr. Venkataraman Thangadurai is a full professor and Chair in Energy at the School of Chemistry. He is the inaugural Faraday Adjunct Professorial Fellow at the University of St Andrews. He is elected Fellows of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), Royal Society of Canada, and the Electrochemical Society (USA). He has published more than 260 peer-reviewed papers in journals (H-index of 68). He has received the Keith Laidler Award from the Canadian Chemical Society (CSC) in 2016 and Research Excellence Award in Materials Chemistry from CSC in 2021. Dr. Thangadurai is founder of two start-ups based on his lithium-ion electrolytes research. His current research activities include the discovery of novel solid-state electrolytes and electrodes for advanced batteries and fuel cells.   We are delighted to announce the launch of the MMRG Monthly Seminars for 2025! These seminars will take place on the last Friday of each month, providing a platform for discussing advances in materials and manufacturing research.
The first seminar was held on 31 January, featuring a talk by Dr Philip Harrison, Co-Lead of MMRG, on Research Vision for Composites Manufacturing. Dr Harrison's talk focused on current research activities and future plans in composites manufacturing technologies. He began with a brief outline of previous research before discussing active funded projects, including work on induction melt thermoforming and characterisation of stitched fabrics. The talk concluded with an outline of future research directions. The session included a Q&A segment, followed by a general group discussion, socialising, and refreshments. If you would like to receive email invitations to our monthly seminars or are interested in attending—either as an audience member or a speaker—please contact Ali ([email protected]) or Jack ([email protected]). We look forward to your participation in the upcoming seminars! Dr. Andrew Feeney is hosting a visit from Professor Panagiota Angeli from the Department of Chemical Engineering at UCL, on Thursday 24th October. Prof. Angeli will be giving a seminar from 10:30-11:30am in the Creativity Suite. The talk title, abstract, and her bio details are below. As places are limited, if you would like to attend, please email Andrew at [email protected] by 17th October to allow him to arrange coffee and tea for 10:15am.
Seminar Title: Intensified metal separations in small channels for sustainable digitalised processing Description: Central to a circular economy is the recycling and reuse of materials, while maintaining their highest possible value, for resource efficiency and waste minimization. Metals, in particular, are indispensable for the transition to a net zero, information based, economy and their recovery from electronic and technological waste is thus crucial. Among the available separation technologies, solvent extractions occupy a prominent role because of their selectivity and versatility. The talk will present recent work on intensified extractions in small channels using novel solvents such as ionic liquids and aqueous biphasic systems. Results will be presented on methodologies for modular scale up and on the integration of sensors for in line measurements. Examples will be shown on the benefits of intensified contactors on the whole process flowsheet for metals recovery. About the Speaker: Prof Panagiota Angeli, FIChemE, is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UCL, Deputy Head ED&I, and leads the ThAMeS Multiphase group. She obtained a Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and a PhD on Multiphase Flows at Imperial College London, UK. She specializes on complex multiphase flows and their application to process intensification and separations. Her research aims to link small scale interactions and interfacial phenomena to the macroscopic behaviour of the complex flows and to the development of predictive models. She has developed intensified small channel flow contactors to perform separations and multiphase chemistries with applications to energy and manufacturing sectors. She is currently investigating the digitization of the separation processes. The experimental investigations have been enabled by original and advanced sensing and measurement techniques, such as micro- and high speed Particle Image Velocimetry, laser induced fluorescence and ultrasound. Prof Angeli’s work has been supported by substantial UK Research Council and European Union grants and by industry. She has been awarded a RAEng/Leverhulme Trust Fellowship, and has participated and chaired UK EPSRC and international (Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium) research funding review panels. She co-chairs the Multiphase Flows Special Interest Group of the EPSRC funded UK Fluids Network and has published over 200 journal papers.   It was a great pleasure to host Prof. Y. Frank Cheng, Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary, for the MMRG Seminar held on Friday, September 6th, at 2:00 pm in JWS 427a.
Seminar Title: A crucial role of pipelines in new energy transport Description: Pipelines have been operating to effectively and efficiently transport oil, natural gas and petrochemical products over seven decades, meeting both industrial and civilian needs. It is believed that pipelines will continue to play a crucial role in transport of new energy (such as hydrogen, biofuels, ammonia, and carbon dioxide), contributing to accelerated energy transition. This talk starts from an overview of the speaker’s previous research in materials science, corrosion/cracking and integrity management on oil/gas pipelines. Then the global development of hydrogen pipeline projects and the associated materials compatibility issues are introduced. The latest research in understanding the hydrogen-iron atomic interactions in gaseous environments is given. The talk will also cover the technical challenges in repurposing existing “aged” pipelines for hydrogen service. About the Speaker: Frank Cheng is Canada Research Chair in Pipeline Engineering and a full Professor at the University of Calgary. He is recognised as an international leader in pipeline corrosion and integrity management research. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) and or the Canadian Academy of Engineering (FCAE). Throughout his career, he has published 3 books and 250+ journal papers, which have amassed over 19,127 citations and have gained him an H-index of 82. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Canadian Distinguished Materials Scientist Award, Metal Chemistry Award of Canadian Metallurgical and Materials Society, H.H. Uhlig Award and Technical Achievement Award of NACE, and International Association of Advanced Materials (IAAM) Medal. He was elected to the board of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering in 2017, and is serving as the Chair of Technical Committee in Materials Technology. He obtained a PhD in Materials Engineering from the University of Alberta in 2000.  Cellular materials are either naturally occurring or engineered porous materials with ordered or disordered arrangement of pores. Periodic cellular solids, usually referred to as lattices are usually engineered to enhance performance attributes such as energy absorption, specific stiffness, specific strength, negative Poisson’s ratio etc. Although such tailored lattices exhibit excellent mechanical properties, their functional attributes such as self-sensing, self-healing etc., have thus far been seldom explored. The integration of sensing into architected lattice geometries will be beneficial for an array of applications. In a recent study published in Advanced Engineering Materials, researchers from the University of Glasgow (led by Prof S. Kumar), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Prof. Brian Wardle), and the University of Cambridge (Prof. Vikram Deshpande) sought to develop self-sensing cellular composites via additive manufacturing. Such self-sensing materials enable transduction of mechanical stimuli into electric signals. This study is featured on the cover page of Advanced Engineering Materials. This was also highlighted in Advanced Science News: 3D Printed Self-Sensing Materials
 Our labs are closed and Zoom might have replaced everything from review meetings to pub Fridays, but last week we received some good news! Computational modelling of inertia friction welding, written in collaboration with Dr Simon Bray at Rolls-Royce, was amongst the top 10% of the articles viewed from the 19th volume of the Proceedings of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (PAMM); Special Issue: 90th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM). This was the first publication for both Ross Williams and Mark Docherty, making this a great start to their publication portfolios and a great achievement for our group as a whole.
We are very pleased to contribute to such an interesting publication and we would encourage all to attend the upcoming 91st GAMM Annual Meeting rearranged for 15th-19th of March 2021 (COVID-19 permitting, of course). You can find this and all other publications from the MMRG in the publications section of our website. Presentations: 5th Postgraduate Experimental Mechanics Conference + 2nd Best Presentation Award11/12/2019
Sheffield Hallam University recently hosted the 5th Postgraduate Experimental Mechanics Conference (PGEM) on the 6th and 7th of December. Organised by the British Society for Strain Measurement, the PGEM Conference aims to bring together PhD/MPhil postgraduate students and early career researchers involved in the field of Engineering measurement and experimental techniques in stress, strain and vibration analysis.
The conference covered areas of research such as Composites, Friction and Wear, and Tribology. Researchers from across the UK and further afield attended and presented at the PGEM conference. Alex, Saad, and Jack from the Materials and Manufacturing Research Group made the journey to Sheffield to take part in the conference. All of them presented recent developments in their research with an emphasis on recent experimental work. A ‘Best Presentation Competition’, sponsored by leading testing equipment manufacturer Instron, ran again during the conference based on peer-assessed judging by all attendees. We are delighted to share that PhD student Jack Perris won the second prize for his presentation on his latest work on the Contact Stiffness of micro-structured interfaces!  MSc student Katy Devlin attended the final year poster presentation session, where she had the chance to present her research done within the group under the supervision of Dr Andrew McBride and Dr Daniele Barbera.
This annual event is an excellent opportunity for postgraduate students to showcase their work and gain some experience in interacting with people from various research backgrounds. At the same time, this event attracts several delegates from industry and academia, who are always looking for enthusiastic and forward-thinking engineers. Katy's work focused on the modelling of rotary friction welding using Abaqus and in-house developed code. Her results attracted interest from several attendees and particularly from the aerospace sector. As she has now completed her course, we would like to wish good luck to Katy for her future career and hope she's enjoyed being part of the group over the last year!  The Materials & Manufacturing Research Group has been represented at the 14th World Conference on Titanium by PhD students; Scott Sneddon, Chris Triantafyllou and Enrique Frutos-Myro. The 5-day conference took place in Nantes, France over the past week, attracting over 600 delegates and featuring over 400 presentations from researchers all around the world. Scott presented his latest work on the mechanical response of Ti407 in the 'Deformation - α+β alloys' session on Tuesday and Chris presented some of his follow-up work on the Ti64 UD-rolled plate, as well as the first public presentation of his novel method of generating representative orientation sets for crystal plasticity simulations for heavily textured regions. Enrique contributed one of over 60 posters on display during the conference on three tools for characterising the tri-modal microstructures in TIMETAL 757.
We also had the fantastic opportunity to visit the Airbus facility in Nantes, specialising on the manufacture of wing boxes, flat panels, air inlets and radomes primarily for the A320, A350 and A380s.
We would like to thank the organising committee and all the conference sponsors for a very interesting week, full of interesting talks that were relevant to the work that we are currently carrying out. The conference proceedings will be available towards the end of the year from the MATEC Web of Conferences platform. We are looking forward to the next conference in 2023, which will welcome the World Ti community in Scotland for the first time ever!  MMRG PhD student, Ross Williams, recently attended the Strategic Partnership Conference organised by Rolls-Royce plc. This conference is held to purvey research which has occurred through a partnership between Rolls-Royce, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and academic institutions. Ross was flying the flag for Scotland even though the University of Glasgow is not in the partnership as an institution, as his funding and project are closely related to key Rolls-Royce objectives around friction welding.
Held at the Vale Resort near Cardiff, the conference featured a broad spectrum of presentations; from computational mechanics to experimental mechanics, materials characterisation and even some machine learning. Ross presented recent work of his and his colleagues Dr Daniele Barbera, Mark Docherty, and Dr Andrew McBride, alongside presentations from PhD students also working on friction welding technologies at Birmingham and Swansea Universities. |
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