Tag Archives: pint of science

Extra on digital twins

Leave a reply

After five months of posting monthly, I cannot resist the temptation to slip in an extra one.  Mainly because I want to let you know about the Pint of Science Festival taking place next week.  In Liverpool we have organised a series of three evenings at the Philharmonic pub on Hope Street featuring talks by engineers from the School of Engineering and the Institute for Digital Engineering and Autonomous Systems (IDEAS) at the University of Liverpool.  I am planning to talk about digital twins – what they are, how we can use them, what they might become and whether we are already part of a digital world.  If you enjoyed reading my posts on ‘Digital twins that thrive in the real world’, ‘Dressing up your digital twin’, and ‘Are we in a simulation?’ then come and discuss digital twins with me in person.  My talk is part of a programme on Digital with Everything on May 15th.  On May 13th and 14th we have programmes on Engineering in Nature and Science of Vision, Colliders and Crashes, respectively.  I hope you can come and join us in the real-world.

Taking an aircraft’s temperature as a health check

Leave a reply

The title of this post is the title of a talk that I will deliver during the Pint of Science Festival in Liverpool later this month.  At last year’s festival I spoke about the very small: Revealing the invisible: real-time motion of virus particles [see ‘Fancy a pint of science‘ on April 27th, 2022].  This year I am moving up the size scale and from biomedical engineering to aerospace engineering to talk about condition monitoring in aircraft structures based on our recent research in the INSTRUCTIVE [see ‘INSTRUCTIVE final reckoning‘ on January 9th 2019] and DIMES [see ‘Our last DIMES‘ on September 22, 2021] projects.  I am going describe how we have reduced the size and cost of infrared instrumentation for monitoring damage propagation in aircraft structures while at the same time increasing the resolution so that we can detect 1 mm increments in crack growth in metals and 6 mm diameter indications of damage in composite materials.  If you want to learn more how we did it and fancy a pint of science, then join us in Liverpool later this month for part of the world’s largest festival of public science.  This year we have a programme of engineering talks on Hope Street in Frederiks on May 22nd and in the Philharmonic Dining Rooms on May 23rd where I be the second speaker.

The University of Liverpool was the coordinator of the DIMES project and the other partners were Empa, Dantec Dynamics GmbH and Strain Solutions Ltd.  Strain Solutions Limited was the coordinator of the INSTRUCTIVE project in which the other participant was the University of Liverpool.  Airbus was the project manager for both projects.

The DIMES and INSTRUCTIVE projects  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 and 6968777 respectively.

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.

Fancy a pint of science?

2 Replies

In September I am planning to initiate a new research project on the interaction of bacteria with cellular and hard surfaces.  It is in collaboration with Jude Curran and is co-funded by Unilever and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.  We have already used the optical method of caustics in a microscope to track and characterise the movement of synthetic nanoparticles as small as 3 nm in an array of biologically-relevant solutions [see ‘Nano biomechanical engineering of agent delivery to cells’ on December 15th, 2021].  We have also used the same technique to characterise and quantify the motion and growth of bacteria in solutions.  Now, we plan to use caustic signatures as a label-free tracking technology for pre-clinical testing of antimicrobial solutions and coatings.  We plan to start by considering binding and removal of viral particles and bacterial spores from hard and soft laundry surfaces using various bacterial species, including Staph aureus which is responsible for laundry malodour; before progressing to the interaction of bacteria with human oral and skin cell cultures.  We are in the process of recruiting a suitable PhD student so if you are interested or know someone who might be suitable then get in touch.  If you want to learn more about our tracking technology and fancy a pint of science, then join us in Liverpool in May for part of the world’s largest festival of public science.  I will be talking about ‘Revealing the invisible: real-time motion of virus particles’  on May 10th at 7.30pm on Leaf of Bold Street.

Liverpool Pint of Science programme

UK Pint of Science programme