Dr W Mirihanage, Prof P Prangnell
No more applications being accepted
Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)
About the Project
Fusion welding is one of the most prominent joining methods that are widely employed to produce and repair metallic structures and components. High level of integrity and reliability of the weld joints must be guaranteed to endure extended service life of those assembled/repaired components/structures to serve under various demanding environments and loads. Thus, defect formation during welding is needed to minimise. Internal flow of the melt pool during welding significantly influences the determination of the final fusion zone morphology, microstructure, defects and resulting residual stresses. Those factors heavily dictate the performance of the weldment and thus reliability, integrity and the lifetime of the assembled structures. However, contemporary understandings of welding processes were mainly obtained through traditional post-weld characterisation and basic simulations. Fewer details are experimentally known about physical mechanisms that dominate the dynamics and transient conditions associated with the melt pool evolution and rapid microstructure formation. Lack of such real time experimental details severely limits the designing of welding processes for high structural integrity.
This project will exploit the unique technical developments of synchrotron X-ray imaging for real time 3D visualisation. An array of new fast in situ imaging experiments at the Diamond Light Source (UK’s national synchrotron facility) is required to carry out for this project. The experiments will novel data to reveal the spatiotemporal evolution of varied physical mechanisms that govern the flow and rapid microstructure formation. Comprehensive analysis of experimentally collected fast image sequences, employing multiple software tools will also be required.
The project will develop novel scientific knowledge about the physical mechanisms operating in weld pools and details on how they influence the formation of the final weld microstructure, defects while inducing residual stresses. The scientific and technical knowledge gained from the project will provide a crucial guidance for weld industrial process design in order to significantly enhance the integrity and reliability.
Funding Notes
Funding covers tuition fees and annual maintenance payments of at least the Research Council minimum (currently £14,553).
Applicants should have or expect to achieve at least a 2.1 honours degree or Masters in Materials Science/Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering or closely related subject.
Students with a First/2.1 degree in Materials Science, Engineering, Mathematics or Physics, subjects are encouraged to apply. Knowledge of numerical modelling, metallurgy or MSc in a related field would be desirable (but not essential).
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