Tag Archives: innovation

Seeing small changes is a big achievement

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Figure 8 from Amjad et al 2022Some years ago I wrote with great excitement about publishing a paper in Royal Society Open Science [see ‘Press release!‘ on November 15th, 2017].  This has become a routine event; however, the excitement returned earlier this month when we had a paper published in the Proceedings of Royal Society of London on ‘A thermal emissions-based real-time monitoring system for in situ detection of cracks’.  The Proceedings were first published in February 1831 and this is only the second time in my career that my group has published a paper in them.  The last time was ten years ago and was also about cracks: ‘Quantitative measurement of plastic strain field at a fatigue crack tip’.  I have already described this earlier work in a post [see ‘Scattering electrons reveal dislocations in material structure’ on November 11th, 2020].  This was the first time that the size and shape of the plastic zone around a crack had been measured directly rather than inferred from other measurements.  It required an expensive scanning electron microscope and a well-equipped laboratory.  In contrast, the work in the paper published this month uses components that can be purchased for the price of a smart phone and assembled into a device not much larger than a smart phone.  The device detects the changes in the temperature distribution over the surface of the metal caused by the propagation of a crack due to repeated loading of the metal.  It is based on the principles of thermoelastic stress analysis [see ‘Counting photons to measure stress‘ on November 18th, 2015], which is a well-established measurement technique that usually requires expensive infra-red cameras.  Our key innovation is to not aim for absolute measurement values, which allows us to ignore calibration requirements, and instead to look for changes in the temperature distribution on the metal surface by extracting feature vectors from the images [see ‘Recognising strain‘ on October 28th 2015].  Our approach lowers the cost of the equipment required by several orders of magnitude, achieves comparable or better resolution of crack growth (around 1 mm) and will function at lower loading frequencies than techniques based on classical thermoelastic stress analysis.  Besides crack analysis, the common theme of the two papers is the innovative use of image processing to identify change, based on the fracture mechanics of crack propagation.

The research reported in this month’s paper was largely performed as part of the DIMES project about which I have written many posts.

The University of Liverpool was the coordinator of the DIMES project and the other partners were Empa, Dantec Dynamics GmbH and Strain Solutions Ltd.  Airbus was the topic manager on behalf of the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking.

Logos of Clean Sky 2 and EUThe DIMES project received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 820951.

The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the author’s view and the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

References:

Amjad, K., Lambert, C.A., Middleton, C.A., Greene, R.J., Patterson, E.A., 2022, A thermal emissions-based real-time monitoring system for in situ detection of cracks, Proc. R. Soc. A., doi: 10.1098/rspa.2021.0796.

Yang, Y., Crimp, M., Tomlinson, R.A., Patterson, E.A., 2012, Quantitative measurement of plastic strain field at a fatigue crack tip, Proc. R. Soc. A., 468(2144):2399-2415.

Image: Figure 8 from Amjad et al, 2022, Proc. R. Soc. A., doi: 10.1098/rspa.2021.0796.

Nudging discoveries along the innovation path

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Decorative photograph of a Welsh hillThe path from a discovery to a successful innovation is often tortuous and many good ideas fall by the wayside.  I have periodically reported on progress along the path for our novel technique for extracting feature vectors from maps of strain data [see ‘Recognizing strain‘ on October 28th, 2015] and its application to validating models of structures by comparing predicted and measured data [see ‘Million to one‘ on November 21st, 2018], and to tracking damage in composite materials [see ‘Spatio-temporal damage maps‘ on May 6th, 2020] as well as in metallic aircraft structures [see ‘Out of the valley of death into a hype cycle‘ on February 24th 2021].  As industrial case studies, we have deployed the technology for validation of predictions of structural behaviour of a prototype aircraft cockpit [see ‘The blind leading the blind‘ on May 27th, 2020] as part of the MOTIVATE project and for damage detection during a wing test as part of the DIMES project.  As a result of the experience gained in these case studies, we recently published an enhanced version of our technique for extracting feature vectors that allows us to handle data from irregularly shaped objects or data sets with gaps in them [Christian et al, 2021].  Now, as part of the Smarter Testing project [see ‘Jigsaw puzzling without a picture‘ on October 27th, 2021] and in collaboration with Dassault Systemes, we have developed a web-based widget that implements the enhanced technique for extracting feature vectors and compares datasets from computational models and physical models.  The THEON web-based widget is available together with a video demonstration of its use and a user manual.  We supplied some exemplar datasets based on our work in structural mechanics as supplementary material associated with our publication; however, it is applicable across a wide range of fields including earth sciences, as we demonstrated in our recent work on El Niño events [see ‘From strain measurements to assessing El Niño events‘ on March 17th, 2021].  We feel that we have taken some significant steps along the innovation path which will lead to adoption of our technique by a wider community; but only time will tell whether this technology survives or falls by the wayside despite our efforts to keep it on track.

Bibliography

Christian WJR, Dvurecenska K, Amjad K, Pierce J, Przybyla C & Patterson EA, Real-time quantification of damage in structural materials during mechanical testing, Royal Society Open Science, 7:191407, 2020.

Christian WJ, Dean AD, Dvurecenska K, Middleton CA, Patterson EA. Comparing full-field data from structural components with complicated geometries. Royal Society open science. 8(9):210916, 2021

Dvurecenska K, Graham S, Patelli E & Patterson EA, A probabilistic metric for the validation of computational models, Royal Society Open Science, 5:1180687, 2018.

Middleton CA, Weihrauch M, Christian WJR, Greene RJ & Patterson EA, Detection and tracking of cracks based on thermoelastic stress analysis, R. Soc. Open Sci. 7:200823, 2020.

Wang W, Mottershead JE, Patki A, Patterson EA, Construction of shape features for the representation of full-field displacement/strain data, Applied Mechanics and Materials, 24-25:365-370, 2010.

Still relevant after ten years

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I am on vacation for the next month so I will not be writing new posts. Instead I have decided to delve into my back catalogue of more than 500 posts [see ‘500th post‘ on February 2nd, 2022] and republish posts from ten, five and one year ago. The short post below was published on September 15th, 2012 under the title ‘Innovation jobs‘. It seems as relevant today as it was in 2012.

Yesterday, I listened to an interesting talk by Dr Liang-Gee Chen, President of the National Applied Research Laboratories of Taiwan at the UK-Taiwan Academic-Industry & Technology Transfer Collaboration Forum organised by the British Council.  He presented some statistics from the Kaufmann Foundation, which demonstrated that nearly all new jobs in the USA are generated by new companies.  When you combine this with my conclusion in my posting on ‘Population crunch’, that we need a higher level of innovation in engineering, then we need to review the education programmes provided for our engineers to ensure that they include innovation and entrepreneurship.  These need to be integrated in engineering education programmes [see Handscombe et al, 2009].  We seem to have lost the plot in the UK and retreated to teaching engineering science, design and management orientated towards the employers with the loudest voice, i.e. multi-nationals, who are not likely to be the source of innovation jobs that will pull us out of the global recession.

Handscombe, R.D., Rodriguez-Falcon, E., Patterson, E.A., 2009, ‘Embedding enterprise in engineering’, IJ Mechanical Engineering Education, 37(4):263-274.

Happy New Year!

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Decorative photograph of sculpture of a skeletal person leading a skeletal dinosaurThis year I have written about 20,000 words in 52 posts (including this one); and, since this is the last post of the year, I thought I would take a brief look back at what has preoccupied me in 2021.  Perhaps, not surprisingly the impact of the coronavirus on our lifestyle has featured regularly – almost every week for a month between mid-March and mid-April when we were in lockdown in the UK.  However, the other topics that I have written about frequently are my research on the dynamics of nanoparticles and, in the last six months, on dealing with uncertainty in digital engineering and decision making.  I have also returned several times to innovation processes and transitioning lab-based research into industry.  While following the COP26 in early November, I wrote a series of three posts focussed on energy consumption and the paradigm shifts required to slow down climate change.  There are some connections between these topics: viruses are nanoparticles whose transport and dynamics we do not fully understand; and, digital engineering tools are being used to explore zero-carbon approaches to, for example, energy generation and air transport.  The level of complexity, innovation and urgency associated with developing solutions to these challenges mean that there are always some unknowns and uncertainty when making associated decisions.

The links below are grouped by the topics mentioned above.  I expect there will be more on all of these topics in 2022; however, the topic of next week’s post is unknown because I have not written any posts in advance.  I hope that the uncertainty about the topic of the next post will keep you reading in 2022! 

Coronavirus pandemic: ‘Distancing ourselves from each other‘ on January 13th, 2021; ‘On the impact of writing on well-being‘ on March 3rd, 2021; ‘Collegiality as a defence against pandemic burnout‘ on March 24th, 2021; ‘It’s tiring looking at yourself‘ on March 31st, 2021; ‘Switching off and walking in circles‘ on April 7th, 2021; ‘An upside to lockdown‘ on April 14th, 2021; ‘A brief respite in a long campaign to overcome coronavirus‘ on June 23rd, 2021; and ‘It is hard to remain positive‘ November 3rd 2021.

Energy and climate change: ‘When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck‘ on August 25th, 2021; ‘It is hard to remain positive‘ November 3rd 2021; ‘Where we are and what we have‘ on November 24th, 2021; ‘Disruptive change required to avoid existential threats‘ on December 1st, 2021; and ‘Bringing an end to thermodynamic whoopee‘ on December 8th, 2021.

Innovation processes: ‘Slowly crossing the valley of death‘ on January 27th, 2021; ‘Out of the valley of death into a hype cycle?‘ on February 24th, 2021; ‘Innovative design too far ahead of the market?‘ on May 5th, 2021 and ‘Jigsaw puzzling without a picture‘ on October 27th, 2021.

Nanoparticles: ‘Going against the flow‘ on February 3rd, 2021; ‘Seeing things with nanoparticles‘ on March 10th, 2021; and ‘Nano biomechanical engineering of agent delivery to cells‘ on December 15th, 2021.

Uncertainty: ‘Certainty is unattainable and near-certainty is unaffordable‘ on May 12th, 2021; ‘Neat earth objects make tomorrow a little less than certain‘ on May 26th, 2021; ‘Negative capability and optimal ambiguity‘ on July 7th, 2021; ‘Deep uncertainty and meta ignorance‘ on July 21st, 2021; ‘Somethings will always be unknown‘ on August 18th, 2021; ‘Jigsaw puzzling without a picture‘ on October 27th, 2021; and, ‘Do you know RIO?‘ on November 17th, 2021.