Dr Gustavo Castelluccio
Applications accepted all year round
Self-Funded PhD Students Only
About the Project
Application Deadline: Position will be open until filled, and priority will be given to early candidates.
Start Date: ASAP
Eligibility: UK, EU, International
Duration of award: 3 years
Supervisors: Dr. Gustavo M. Castelluccio
The application of repetitive loads results in fatigue damage that can cause catastrophic failures. The ambient conditions around a fatigue crack tip has a dramatic effect on the fate of a component—a part may survive millions of cycles in vacuum and last only a few hundreds of thousands in air and much lower in actively corrosive environments. Although there is a clear synergy between damage and corrosion, most fatigue predictions ignore the environment. This strategy carries large error and requires vast amount of expensive experimental data. Worse, sometimes the experimental data is simply inaccessible.
The need for cost-efficient research that prevents fatigue failures has pushed towards integrated computational materials engineering approaches that improve competitiveness. These approaches rely on physics-based models that can be validated with experiments and bottom-up models at multiple scales in order to predict the macroscopic response. Hence, this research will investigate the degradation of metallic materials under corrosion-fatigue conditions by integrating multiscale physics-based models combined with mesoscale experimental tests.
This research will study the effects of corrosion-induced changes in composition on fatigue damage in metallic materials. We will employ 3-D crystal plasticity models in order to understand the role of compositional changes in fatigue damage. We will correlate these changes with a realistic degradation from corrosion processes. The simulations will be integrated with mesoscale experimental to evaluate the constitutive response of smooth specimens degraded by corrosion. Given the innovative nature of this research, it will represent a milestone in corrosion-fatigue research and will likely mark a path towards future degradation assessments.
Entry requirements:
Applicants should have a first or second class UK honours degree or equivalent in a related discipline, such as computer science, mathematics, or engineering.
The candidate should be self-motivated and have excellent analytical, reporting and communication skills.
Funding:
Self-funded or partially funded. Please contact the supervisor for more information.
How to apply:
For further information please contact: Dr. Gustavo M. Castelluccio E: [Email Address Removed], T: (0) 1234 750111 Ext: 2092
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