Extreme weather behaviour of composite materials

Applications of composites cover a wide range of applications including aerospace, powerhouse, oil refinery etc., within which it is critical to understand the potential for failure of these components. This project will analyse creep/fatigue mechanisms and methods that can be employed to predict failures in highly demanding situations such as extreme weather conditions.

The project will feature both a numerical component (focused on developing a multi-scale modelling of a material and later embedding this into an existing commercial software package) and an experimental component (providing micro-structural characterisation in order to validate the multi-scale model.