Mission
The research group leading this lab focuses its expertise on the analysis of structural integrity problems in engineering components and materials. Multiphysics and multidisciplinary approaches are pursued to advance understanding of material behavior and to solve engineering challenges related to design against failure and damage tolerant design. In particular, the mains research interests within this area lie in:
- Material constitutive law characterisation and modelling, i.e. cyclic elasto-plastic, temperature dependent behavior, visco-plastic effects.
- Fatigue and fracture assessment of materials and structures: low- and high-cycle fatigue, thermo-mechanical fatigue, variable amplitude fatigue.
- Residual stress evaluation and modelling across the length-scales.
- Effect of mechanical & thermal material processes on materials and structures performance
- X-ray Synchrotron diffraction analyses for engineering materials: phase ID; residual stress evaluation; surface characterisation; material texture analysis; in-situ characterisation.
- Modelling of diffusion processes.
Equipment
Advanced numerical methods are developed and employed within the group to advance scientific knowledge in this field and exploit their potential is practical industry-oriented applications. Currently, SIMED lab is equipped with the following software to solve specific problems.
- ANSYS (Cyclic elasto-plastic analyses, thermo-mechanical analyses, time-dependent structural problems, contacts and other non-linear behaviors)
- COMSOL (Crack propagation, structural problems, thermo-mechanical problems, processes governed by PDEs)
- Open-source FEM (Contour Method for the evaluation of residual stress and generic structural simulations)
- Simufact (Manufacturing processes simulation)
- Autodesk package (2D/3D modelling)