Tag Archives: dynamics

Slow start to an exciting new project on thermoacoustic response of AM metals

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We held the kick-off meeting for a new research project this week.  It’s a three-way collaboration involving three professors based in Portugal, the UK and USA [Chris Sutcliffe, John Lambros at UIUC and me]; so, our kick-off meeting should have involved at least two of us travelling to the laboratory of the third collaborator and spending some time brainstorming about the challenges that we have agreed to tackle over the next three years.  Instead we had a call via Skype and a rather procedural meeting in which we covered all of the issues without really engendering any excitement or sparking any new ideas.  It would appear that we need the stimulus of new environments to maximise our creativity and that we use body language as well as facial expressions to help us reach a friendly consensus on which  crazy ideas are worth pursuing and which should be quietly forgotten.

Our new research project has a long title: ‘Thermoacoustic response of Additively Manufactured metals: A multi-scale study from grain to component scales‘.  In simple terms, we are going to look at whether residual stresses could be designed to be beneficial to the performance of structural parts used in demanding environments such as those found in reusable spacecraft, hypersonic flight vehicles and breeder blankets in fusion reactors.  Residual stresses are often induced during the manufacture of parts and are usually detrimental to the performance of the part.  Our hypothesis is that in additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, we have sufficient control of the manufacture of the part that we can introduce ‘designer stresses’ which will improve the part’s performance in demanding environments.  The research is funded jointly by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the UK and is supported by The MTC and Renishaw plc; you can find out more at Grants on the Web. The research will be building on our recent research on ‘Potential dynamic buckling in hypersonic vehicle skin‘ [posted July 1st, 2020] and earlier work, see ‘Hot stuff‘ on September 13th, 2012.  While the demanding environment is not new to us, we will be using 3D printed parts for the first time instead of components made by conventional (subtractive) machining and taking them to higher temperatures.

The thumbnail shows measured modal shapes for a subtractively-manufactured plate subject to the three temperature regimes: room temperature (left), transverse heating of the centre of the plate (middle) and longitudinal heating on one edge (right) from Silva, A.S., Sebastian, C.M., Lambros, J. and Patterson, E.A., 2019. High temperature modal analysis of a non-uniformly heated rectangular plate: Experiments and simulations. J. Sound & Vibration, 443, pp.397-410.

 

Potential dynamic buckling in hypersonic vehicle skin

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The skin of an aircraft is supported on the inside by a network, or mesh, of ribs and stringers running approximately at right angles to one another; so that the skin is effectively a series of rectangular plates supported around their edges.   In hypersonic flight, above five times the speed of sound, these rectangular plates are subject to vibration and to high temperatures that vary spatially and with time.  The combined vibratory and thermal loading causes the plates to buckle out of plane which has two possible detrimental consequences: first, it causes the formation of fatigue cracks leading to catastrophic failure; and, second, it might influence the formation of the boundary layer in the flow over the skin of the aircraft and affect the aerodynamics of the aircraft.  In my laboratory, we have built a test-rig that allows us to subject rectangular plates to random mechanical vibrations up to 1000Hz and, at the same time, to temperature distributions upto 1000K that vary in time and space.  Earlier this year, we published an article in which we showed, by experiment, that an edge-reinforced rectangular plate behaved as a dynamic system in response to thermal loading.  In other words, when a constant temperature distribution is applied, the shape of the plate varies with time until an equilibrium state is achieved.  In addition, we found that the post-buckled shape of the plate is not proportional to the energy supplied but dependent on the in-plane temperature distribution.  Probably, both of these observed behaviours are a result of differential thermal expansion of the plate and its reinforcements.

The image shows point-wise temperature and displacement measurements (centre) at the centre and edge of a reinforced plate (top) subject to a localised strip of heating over time as shown by the temperature distributions (bottom).

This is the fourth in a series of posts on recent work published by my research group.  The others are: ‘Salt increases nanoparticle diffusion‘ on April 22nd, 2020; ‘Spatio-temporal damage maps for composite materials‘ on May 6th, 2020; and, ‘Thinking out of the box leads to digital image correlation through space‘ on June 24th, 2020.

Source:

Santos Silva AC, Lambros J, Garner DM & Patterson EA, Dynamic response of a thermally stressed plate with reinforced edges, Experimental Mechanics, 60:81-92, 2020.

Engineering idiom

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Many of us, either as students or as instructors, will have experienced the phenomenon that students are more likely to give a correct answer when the context is familiar [Linn & Hyde, 1989; Chapman et al 1991].  Conversely, a lack of familiarity may induce students to panic about the context and fail to listen in a lecture [Rosser, 2004] or to appreciate the point of a question in an examination.  Your dictionary probably gives two meanings for context: ‘surrounding conditions’ and ‘a construction of speech’.  You would think that the importance of teaching by reference to the surrounding condition is so obvious as to require no comment; except professors forget that conditions experienced by students are different to their own, both now and when they were students [Nathan, 2005 & ‘Creating an evolving learning environment’ on February 21st, 2018].  To get an appreciation of how different consult the ‘Mindset List‘ produced each year by Beloit College; for example as far as the class of 2020 are concerned robots have always been surgical partners in the operating room [#55 on the 2020 Mindset List].

What about the construction of speech?  I think that there is an engineering idiom because engineering education has its own ‘language’ of models and analogies.  Engineering science is usually taught in the context of idealised applications, such as colliding spheres, springs and dashpots, and shafts.  It would be wrong to say that they have no relevance to the subject; but, the relevance is often only apparent to those well-versed in the subject; and, by definition, students are not.  The result is a loss of perceived usefulness of learning which adversely influences student motivation [Wigfield & Eccles, 2000] – they are more likely to switch off, so keep the language simple.

References:

Chipman S, Marshall S, Scott P. Content effects on word problem performance: A possible source of test bias? American Educational Research Journal, 28(4), 897-915, 1991.

Linn M, Hyde J, Gender, mathematics, and science, Educational Researcher, 18(8), 17-19, 22-27, 1989.

Nathan R, My freshman year: what a professor learned by becoming a student, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2005.

Rosser SV, Gender issues in teaching science, in S. Rose. and B. Brown (eds.), Report on the 2003 Workshop on Gender Issues in the Sciences, pp. 28-37, 2004.

Wigfield A, Eccles JS, Expectancy-value theory of motivation, Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1): 68-81, 2000.

 

CALE #7 [Creating A Learning Environment: a series of posts based on a workshop given periodically by Pat Campbell and Eann Patterson in the USA supported by NSF and the UK supported by HEA]

Formative experiences

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about how we all arrive in the classroom with different experiences that are strongly influenced by the conditions in our formative years.  When I talk about this process in workshops on teaching, I invite attendees to tell us about something that has influenced their approach to learning.  However, I kick-off by sharing one of mine: I joined the Royal Navy straight from school and so I arrived at University having painted the white line down the centre of the flight deck of an aircraft carrier but also having flown a jet.  This meant that my experience of dynamics was somewhat different to most of my peers.  It’s amazing the life experiences that are revealed when we go around the room at these workshops.  Feel free to share your experiences and how they influence your learning using the comments section below.

CALE #2 [Creating A Learning Environment: a series of posts based on a workshop given periodically by Pat Campbell and Eann Patterson in the USA supported by NSF and the UK supported by HEA]

Photo by Pedro Aragao [Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported]