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!

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.

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!

The MRG was recently represented by Ross Williams at the 90th Annual Meeting of GAMM​, hosted in the city of Vienna, Austria. There, a follow-up to the presentation at the ECCM was presented, including recent developments on modelling the Inertia Friction Welding process. These include the introduction of an isotropic hardening law capable of capturing the difference in flow stress over a wide range of temperatures and strain rates.

Coinciding with the General Assembly of GAMM, this year's conference attracted over 1,000 delegates presenting work in areas spanning mathematics, material modelling and scientific computing, to name a few. Organised by the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) and hosted by the Universität Wien, the conference was a great success and we are looking forward to the next Annual Meeting in Kassel in 2020!

Last week, MRG PhD students Kayleigh Nelson and Chris Triantafyllou went to Oxford, UK to present updates on their latest work at the 2nd International Workshop on Mechanistic Behaviour of HCP Alloys organised by HexMat!

The workshop took place at the beautiful surroundings of Pembroke College of the University of Oxford from the 16th-19th of September, attracting speakers from the UK, France and the US.

Organised by HexMat, the 5-year collaborative EPSRC programme focusing on hexagonal metals for the aerospace, defence and energy sectors, the workshop also welcomed speakers and attendees from industry, including Rolls-Royce and TIMET, as well as from organisations including the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

As the majority of talks focused on titanium, this was a great opportunity for us to present our latest work to a highly specialised audience, have stimulating and engaging discussions on some of the issues currently faced in industry, as well as get some advice for our own research.

Many thanks to Saira Naeem, Ben Britton and Fionn Dunne of Imperial College London for their wonderful work and effort in organising and running the workshop!

MRG PhD students Kayleigh Nelson and Chris Triantafyllou attended the Aerospace Symposium 2017 organised by the University of Glasgow and had the chance to present two posters on their research.

The event which attracted over 80 delegates from industry and academia was focused on manufacturing for growth and featured interesting presentations from Airbus COO, Tom Williams, BAE Systems Head of Manufacturing and Materials Engineering, Andrew Schofield, and more.

Kayleigh's work focuses on the deformation of titanium alloys and how this differs between single- and dual-phase alloys. Chris has previously worked on cold-dwell fatigue and is currently investigation the effect of cross-rolling on notched fatigue behaviour. You can find out more about both projects here!

The Materials Research Group hosted a 2-day workshop at the University of Glasgow on 'Modelling the Micromechanics of Polycrystalline Materials'. The workshop took place on the 7-8th April 2016 and was sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, the EPSRC and the University of Glasgow.

The goal of the workshop was to introduce researchers to the crystal plasticity finite element software package, FEpX, and a number of tools, including the virtual polycrystal generation package, Neper, and the crystal orientation calculation toolbox, ODFPF, that together constitute a complete capability for modelling polycrystalline solids.

The workshop was aimed at young researchers such as graduate students and post-doctoral associates who would like to integrate crystal-scale finite element modelling into their own research projects. Workshop attendees came from University of Oxford, Imperial College London, University of Manchester, University of Birmingham and University of Strathclyde.

The workshop consisted of several lectures as well as practical modelling experience, with the attendees executing FEpX simulations on a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster at the University of Glasgow.

The workshop was led by Prof. Paul Dawson (Cornell University, USA), Dr Romain Quey ( Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France) and Matt Kasemer (Cornell University, USA).

More information about the software packages used in the workshop can be found here:

• FEpX - Crystal plasticity finite element software package
  
• Neper - Virtual polycrystal generation and meshing software package
• ODFPF - Crystal orientation calculations MATLAB toolbox

Euan and Kayleigh attended the International Workshop on 'Mechanistic Behaviour of HCP Alloys 2016', which was held at Pembroke College, Oxford, UK.

This workshop drew together industrial and academic experts from a variety of disciplines, including materials science and engineering, mechanical engineering, non destructive testing, and high rate deformation. Discussions focused on microstructure-performance property relationships and their impact on engineering components in industries such as aerospace, nuclear power, and transport. Read more about it here.

Euan presented his recent work on determining Ti-6Al-4V single crystal material parameters using a discrete spherical harmonic analysis of lattice strain pole figures from in situ mechanical testing at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source and crystal plasticity finite element simulations. Euan also chaired a session on the high strain rate behaviour of HCP materials.