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!

The University of Glasgow hosted for the first time the Postgraduate Experimental Mechanics Conference (PGEM) on the 6th and 7th of December. Organised by the British Society for Strain Measurement, he 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.

Due to its relevance to a lot of our work and proximity, the conference was well attended by our group with Kayleigh, Scott, Colin, Chris, Ross, Alex & Saad presenting during the 2-day event!

The conference attracted researchers from 10 different UK and European universities and the work presented focused on key areas including composites, metals, tribology and biomaterials.

A ‘Best Presentation Competition’, sponsored by leading testing equipment manufacturer Instron, ran during the conference based on peer-assessed judging by all attendees. We are delighted to share that MRG PhD student Chris Triantafyllou won the first prize for his presentation on his latest work on the fatigue behaviour of Ti64 UD plate.

We would like to thank the organisers for the smooth running of the conference and we hope to see everyone at next year's PGEM conference at Sheffield Hallam University! You can find out more about the BSSM and the conference sponsors below:

As this is also our final update for 2018, we would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas! We'll be back with more news and updates in 2019!

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!

MSc student Martin Packham presented his summer project research work on carburisation of thin-walled pipes at high-temperature at the 28th International Workshop on Computational Mechanics of Materials (IWCMM) in Glasgow between the 10th and the 12th of September 2018. This research project, supervised by Dr Daniele Barbera, has been sponsored by EPSRC through a scholarship for students willing to start a PhD. The research done has yielded interesting results that will be used to further explore research directions in the field. In addition, the research work will be extended through a collaborating with the University of Strathclyde and results will be submitted for publication.
 
Within the same conference, Dr Daniele Barbera presented his work on unexpected plastic strain accumulation in the notched bar during high-temperature creep dwell. The audience has welcomed the results presented and new research collaborations have been discussed. The overall event was a great success and an excellent opportunity to disseminate the research done at MRG.

PhD student Ross Williams presented the latest updates on the research focused on computationally modelling inertia friction welding of nickel superalloys at the 6th European Conference on Computational Mechanics in Glasgow last week.

The research led by Dr Daniele Barbera, and for which Ross is a key contributor, has yielded notable progress over the last six months and the work presented included a numerical parametric study, whilst quantifying convergence of solutions as well as validating the robust nature of the work. You can read the full abstract here.

Coinciding with the 7th European Conference on Computational Fluid Dynamics, this year's conference attracted over 1,900 delegates and covered an extremely wide range of computational work and applications in over 120 sessions. Hosted jointly between the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, this is Europe's largest computational mechanics conference and was held in Scotland for the first time.

In addition to this, many other members of the MRG were involved in ECCM-ECFD 2018, including Dr Andrew McBride on the organising committee, as well as numerous other students involved as helpers. The event was a great success and we are looking forward to the next ECCM-ECFD conference in Paris in 2020!

MRG PhD student, Chris Triantafyllou, has been named the winner of the esteemed Whittle Reactionaries Prize 2018 by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE).

The Whittle Reactionaries Prize Fund was established in 1998 by a group of Institution members in recognition of those engineers and others who had directly assisted Sir Frank Whittle in his company Power Jets Ltd during its pioneering and evolutionary work with reaction propulsion (jet propulsion) from the first experiments in 1937 to first operation use of Whittle Type W2B engines in an RAF Meteor aircraft in 1944.

Chris' work on implementing a scalable crystal plasticity model to simulate the cold-dwell fatigue behaviour of Ti64 billet was adjudicated by a panel of engineers chosen by the Combined Propulsion Technical Activity Committee of the IMechE and the Royal Aeronautical Society. The objective of the prize is to stimulate and encourage those in the early stages of their engineering career to continue to apply innovative and forward-looking thinking to aerospace propulsion problems that demonstrates:

• Technical excellence
• Originality and independent thinking
• High-quality presentation and effective communication

​​Chris added:

Dr Andrew McBride and PhD student Chris Triantafyllou travelled to Schöntal, Germany, last week to present the latest work on the use of specific experimental techniques and how these can be effectively used in conjunction with crystal plasticity simulations in the context of cold-dwell fatigue of titanium alloys.

The workshop organised by the Karlruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)  was held in the ex-monastery Kloster Schöntal and attracted leading figures in the field of dislocation modelling from all over the world with main focus on physical based continuum theories and simulations, but also featured comparisons with experimental work.

Chris gave a presentation of how crystal plasticity is aiding his research on cold-dwell fatigue, explained how the model was calibrated and what our goals are by analysing x-ray diffraction (Synchrotron) results in order to deepen our understanding of this behaviour, as well as improve the plasticity model.

Professor Paul Steinmann based at FAU in Erlangen, Germany and the University of Glasgow also gave a presentation on the current state and challenges in developing a physical based continuum theory of dislocations. Paul is the director of the Glasgow Computational Engineering Centre (GCEC) at the University of Glasgow and more information can be found here.

Last week Dr Euan Wielewski travelled to cold and snowy Ithaca with PhD students Kayleigh Nelson and Chris Triantafyllou to carry out experiments at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS).

Following up on Kayleigh's previous work, her experiments focused on the material's behaviour during strain jumps and Chris' experiments compared the fatigue behaviour with and without dwell episodes. These experiments marked the start of investigations on unidirectionally-rolled Ti64 for Chris and on cross-rolled Ti64 for Kayleigh.

The huge advantage of working in-situ at a synchrotron is that we were able to capture lattice strains through powder (x-ray) diffraction with an acquisition frequency of up to 10Hz. This is not only useful in providing a deeper understanding of the mechanical response at the grain level, but also generates information that can be used to significantly improve our computational models. Both Kayleigh and Chris will be resuming work using FEpX later next year, also developed at Cornell University.

Many thanks go to our collaborators from CHESS, Darren Pagan and Peter Ko, as well as Glenhead Engineering for their fantastic work with our millimetre-thick specimens!