The increased demand for specialised products and technologies is driving manufacturing innovation and the development of new advanced materials. Many objects in our everyday life have been transformed—and in most cases—improved by the application of advanced materials like metals, ceramics, gels, polymers and composites. The benefits come not only from greater quantities of existing materials at reduced costs but also from the development of materials with totally new properties that enhance safety and sustainability. These new materials outperform conventional ones as they have properties that improve toughness and durability.
To ensure that the engineering structures made of these materials can perform as required, they need to be tested under dynamic loading conditions to see how they behave. Whether it’s a mobile phone dropping onto a hard surface, a car crashing into a brick wall, a bullet striking an armour plate, or even a meteorite crashing to Earth, impact dynamics investigates collisions and how materials and structures perform and function when subjected to a range of extreme loading conditions.
Using a synergy of our expertise regarding advanced materials and of their behaviour under dynamic impact loading conditions we focus on developing resilient materials and structures for engineering applications. Using experimental investigation, we test materials over a wide spectrum of strain rates ranging from 10-3 to 107 s-1.
Our areas of expertise cover the study of advanced composite materials across:
Our research works to:
Fernando PLN; Mohotti D; Remennikov A; Hazell PJ; Wang H; Amin A, 2020, 'Experimental, numerical and analytical study on the shock wave propagation through impedance-graded multi-metallic systems', International Journal of Mechanical Sciences, vol. 178, pp. 105621 - 105621
Kader MA; Hazell PJ; Brown AD; Tahtali M; Ahmed S; Escobedo JP; Saadatfar M, 2020, 'Novel design of closed-cell foam structures for property enhancement', Additive Manufacturing, vol. 31
Kader MA; Brown AD; Hazell PJ; Robins V; Escobedo JP; Saadatfar M, 2020, 'Geometrical and topological evolution of a closed-cell aluminium foam subject to drop-weight impact: An X-ray tomography study', International Journal of Impact Engineering, vol. 139
Lopatin AV; Morozov EV, 2020, 'Buckling of a rectangular composite orthotropic plate with two parallel free edges and the other two edges clamped and subjected to uniaxial compressive distributed load', European Journal of Mechanics, A/Solids, vol. 81
Aryal B; Morozov EV; Shankar K, 2020, 'Effects of ballistic impact damage on mechanical behaviour of composite honeycomb sandwich panels', Journal of Sandwich Structures and Materials, pp. 109963622090974 - 109963622090974
Wang C; Ramakrishnan KR; Shankar K; Morozov E; Wang H; Fien A, 2020, 'Homogenized shell element-based modeling of low-velocity impact response of stainless-steel wire mesh', Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures, pp. 1 - 16
Aryal B; Morozov EV; Wang H; Shankar K; Hazell PJ; Escobedo-Diaz JP, 2019, 'Effects of impact energy, velocity, and impactor mass on the damage induced in composite laminates and sandwich panels', Composite Structures, vol. 226
Our research topics and projects include the development of new structural design and analysis methods, experimental characterisation of new materials, studies of structural performance, and manufacturing effects. Research projects include:
Undergraduate research projects
Postgraduate research projects