Tag Archives: MyResearch

Fourth industrial revolution

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Have you noticed that we are in the throes of a fourth industrial revolution?

The first industrial revolution occurred towards the end of the 18th century with the introduction of steam power and mechanisation.  The second industrial revolution took place at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and was driven by the invention of electrical devices and mass production.  The third industrial revolution was brought about by computers and automation at the end of the 20th century.  The fourth industrial revolution is happening as result of combining physical and cyber systems.  It is also called Industry 4.0 and is seen as the integration of additive manufacturing, augmented reality, Big Data, cloud computing, cyber security, Internet of Things (IoT), simulation and systems engineering.  Most organisations are struggling with the integration process and, as a consequence, are only exploiting a fraction of the capabilities of the new technology.  Revolutions are, by their nature, disruptive and those organisations that embrace and exploit the innovations will benefit while the existence of the remainder is under threat [see [‘The disrupting benefit of innovation’ on May 23rd, 2018].

Our work on the Integrated Nuclear Digital Environment, on Digital Twins, in the MOTIVATE project and on hierarchical modelling in engineering and biology is all part of the revolution.

Links to these research posts:

‘Enabling or disruptive technology for nuclear engineering?’ on January 28th, 2015

‘Can you trust your digital twin?’ on November 23rd, 2016

‘Getting Smarter’ on June 21st, 2017

‘Hierarchical modelling in engineering and biology’ [March 14th, 2018]

 

Image: Christoph Roser at AllAboutLean.com from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Industry_4.0.png [CC BY-SA 4.0].

Spontaneously MOTIVATEd

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Some posts arise spontaneously, stimulated by something that I have read or done, while others are part of commitment to communicate on a topic related to my research or teaching, such as the CALE series.  The motivation for a post seems unrelated to its popularity.  This post is part of that commitment to communicate.

After 12 months, our EU-supported research project, MOTIVATE [see ‘Getting Smarter‘ on June 21st, 2017] is one-third complete in terms of time; and, as in all research it appears to have made a slow start with much effort expended on conceptualizing, planning, reviewing prior research and discussions.  However, we are on-schedule and have delivered on one of our four research tasks with the result that we have a new validation metric and a new flowchart for the validation process.  The validation metric was revealed at the Photomechanics 2018 conference in Toulouse earlier this year [see ‘Massive Engineering‘ on April 4th, 2018].  The new flowchart [see the graphic] is the result of a brainstorming [see ‘Brave New World‘ on January 10th, 2018] and much subsequent discussion; and will be presented at a conference in Brussels next month [ICEM 2018] at which we will invite feedback [proceedings paper].  The big change from the classical flowchart [see for example ASME V&V guide] is the inclusion of historical data with the possibility of not requiring experiments to provide data for validation purposes. This is probably a paradigm shift for the engineering community, or at least the V&V [Validation & Verification] community.  So, we are expecting some robust feedback – feel free to comment on this blog!

References:

Hack E, Burguete RL, Dvurecenska K, Lampeas G, Patterson EA, Siebert T & Szigeti E, Steps toward industrial validation experiments, In Proceedings Int. Conf. Experimental Mechanics, Brussels, July 2018 [pdf here].

Dvurcenska K, Patelli E & Patterson EA, What’s the probability that a simulation agrees with your experiment? In Proceedings Photomechanics 2018, Toulouse, March 2018.

 

 

Third time lucky

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At the end of last year my research group had articles published by the Royal Society’s journal  Open Science in two successive months [see ‘Press Release!‘ on November 15th, 2017 and ‘Slow moving nanoparticles‘ on December 13th, 2017].  I was excited about both publications because I had only had one article published before by the Royal Society and because the Royal Society issues a press release whenever it publishes a new piece of science.  However, neither press release generated any interest from anyone; probably because science does not sell newspapers (or attract viewers) unless it is bad news or potentially life-changing.  And our work on residual stress around manufactured holes in aircraft or on the motion of nanoparticles does not match either of these criteria.

Last month, we did it again with an article on ‘An experimental study on the manufacture and characterization of in-plane fibre-waviness defects in composites‘.  Third time lucky, because this time our University press office were interested enough to write a piece for the news page of the University website, entitled ‘Engineers develop new method to recreate fibre waviness defects in lab‘.  Fibre waviness is an issue in the manufacture of structural components of aircraft using carbon fibre reinforced composites because kinks or waves in the fibres can cause structural weaknesses.  As part of his PhD, supported by Airbus and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Will Christian developed an innovative technique to generate defects in our lab so that we can gain a better understanding of them. Read the article or the press release to find out more!

Image shows fracture through a waviness-defect in the top-ply of a carbon-fibre laminate observed in a microscope following sectioning after failure.

Reference:

Christian WJR, DiazDelaO FA, Atherton K & Patterson EA, An experimental study on the manufacture and characterisation of in-plane fibre-waviness defects in composites, R. Soc. open sci. 5:180082, 2018.

INSTRUCTIVE research relevance

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The Southwest airplane accident last week has been initially attributed to a fatigue crack in a fan blade in the engine.  One of the reasons that this an extremely rare event is the enormous research effort that has been expended on the design, testing and maintenance of the engines and the airframe.  It’s an ongoing research effort to address the trilemma of aircraft that are safe, sustainable and low cost to build and operate.  In collaboration with Strain Solutions Limited, we are in the last year of a three-year project called INSTRUCTIVE which is funded by the Clean Sky 2 programme of the European Commission [see ‘Instructive report and Brexit‘ on March 29th, 2017].   The focus of the research is the development of techniques for use in the aerospace industry to detect the initiation of cracks in the airframe before the crack is visible to the naked eye [see ‘Instructive update‘ on October 4th, 2017].  Laboratory-based techniques exist with this capability and the objective is to transfer the technology to the industrial scale and environment – initially in structural tests performed as part of the design and certification process and perhaps later as part of inspections of aircraft in service.  So far, we have moved from the small components reported in the update posted in October, to a chunk of aircraft fuselage in our lab and we are preparing to participate in a test being conducted by Airbus later this year.

We are also planning a knowledge exchange workshop on ‘Real-time damage tracking in engineering structures’ on November 21st, 2018 at the University of Liverpool’s London campus.  The one-day workshop is being organised in collaboration with the British Society for Strain Measurement.  More details to follow – it will be free!

Image Credit: Powering the 737: CFM56-7 series | by Frans Zwart at https://www.flickr.com/photos/15545136@N06/9719995154  [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]