Metal-ceramic composites offer many advantages over monolithic metals and their alloys such as high specific stiffness and strength, better creep, fatigue and wear resistance, and good thermal properties.
In many oil wells the natural energy associated with oil is not strong enough to cause flow into the production facilities. In such cases, some form of artificial lift should supplement natural energy.
Combining dissimilar materials such metals and fibre-reinforced composites in structural components has potential to reduce weight and improve structural performance in many applications.
Multi-objective optimisation and multi-criteria assessment and decision making is an indivisible part of the design and planning of hybrid energy systems.
Dielectric elastomers are soft, muscle-like actuators that have seen a great uptake in robotics. The main reasons being the improved manoeuvrability and dexterity they provide.
Chemicals such as pharmaceuticals, fertilizers and reagents are ubiquitous in our modern society which are mainly produced from fossil fuels, e.g., petroleum and natural gas.
Controlling systems with nonlinear dynamics is an area of great interest, due to its immediate impact on a number of technological areas such as nanopositioning, vibration isolation / control systems, drill strings, soft robots etc.
This project is part of a wider research programme into biological routes for the synthesis of chemical products. A key element of this approach is the separation of the chemical products from the aqueous broths produced by the bioreactors/anaerobic digestors, which is commonly achieved via distillation.
