Welcome to the home page of Computational Design and Structural Materials (CDSM)!
VISION
Our aim is to understand, describe, control and optimise the behaviour of materials and structures by understanding, describing, controlling and optimising their micro-structures.
Our ultimate goal is to provide the industry and fellow academic community with suggestions on how to
- improve the sustainability of materials/structures
- offer customisable recommendations for industry/medicine
- numerically predict the behaviour of novel materials and structures
- decrease the time and number of costly experiments used for the analysis of a component/structure
- decrease the price of components/structures
RESEARCH GOAL
We see our general research goal in improving existing materials’ properties, such as strength, ductility, thermal properties; reducing the cost, weight and waste; increasing sustainability and architectural freedom; and potentially creating new materials with desired and tuneable properties.
RESEARCH APPROACH
Our main research themes are mechanics of materials and computational analysis. We aim at describing, analysing and optimising material’s behaviour by means of numerical modelling (via molecular dynamics, dislocation dynamics, FE, data-driven and fuzzy set based approaches), and statistical and stochastic characterisation. Realising that in the world around us, most natural and man-made materials are far from being strictly deterministic and ordered, we look at incorporating and utilising this disorder and stochasticity in our models.
We work with a range of applications from man-made materials, such as concrete, polymers, composites and metals, (conventionally made and additively manufactured), to bio-materials, such as bones and teeth. We also look into computationally designing new and more sustainable materials.
We work on different scales of observation ranging from nano- to macro-, and consider how these scales cross-fertilise each other via multi-scale modelling strategies.
MISSION
The main mission of the group is to offer solutions that are, on one hand, customisable and unique to particular industrial applications, but, on the other hand, thorough and general in approach, based on the first principles and primary questions:
- Why a material behaves the way it does?
- How to model a material?
- What are the overall effective properties of a material?
- How to characterise them?
- Can they be user-controlled and tuned?
- What can we learn from and how can we cross-fertilise approaches in different physics?
