Research Projects

All research projects at the School of Engineering. You can search keywords within Project title and filter by Research Institute.

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Project Title Principal Supervisor Research Institutes Project Summary
Influence of snow structure and properties on the grip of winter tyres

Dr Jane Blackford

Materials and Processes

The aim of this project is to investigate the friction of rubber and tyre treads on snow. It is a collaborative project with Michelin. We use tribological testing and materials characterisation techniques in a specially designed cold room facility to do this. Ultimately this knowledge will be used to improve tyre traction on snow.

Ice-Rubber Friction for Tyres

Dr Jane Blackford

Materials and Processes

The aim of this project is to gain a better understanding of the nature of the interface between rubber and ice. It is a collaborative project with Michelin. We use tribological testing and materials characterisation techniques in a specially designed cold room facility to do this. Ultimately this knowledge will be used to improve tyre traction on ice.

High Performance Computing Support for United Kingdom Consortium on Turbulent Reacting Flows (UKCTRF)

Dr Stephen Welch

Infrastructure and Environment

The proposed UK Consortium on Turbulent Reacting Flows will perform high-fidelity computational simulations (i.e. Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes simulations (RANS), Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS)) by utilising national High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to address the challenges related to energy through the fundamental physical understanding and modelling of turbulent reacting flows. Engineering applications range from the formulation of reliable fire-safety measures to the design of energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly internal combustion engines and gas turbines.

FireComp: Modelling the thermo-mechanical behaviour of high pressure vessel in composite materials when exposed to fire conditions

Dr Stephen Welch

Infrastructure and Environment

Hydrogen is expected to be highly valuable energy carrier for the 21st century as it should participate in answering main societal and economical concerns. To exploit its benefits at large scale, further research and technological developments are required. In particular, the storage of hydrogen must be secured. Even if burst in service of pressure vessels in composite material is very unlikely, when exposed to a fire, they present safety challenges imposing to correctly size their means of protection.

Engineering the Byzantine water supply: procurement, construction and operation

Dr Simon Smith

Infrastructure and Environment

This innovative research combines construction process modelling and contemporary network software to gain new insights to conceptualise the construction and distribution of the city’s hydraulic networks.

Challenging RISK: Achieving Resilience by Integrating Societal and Technical Knowledge

Professor Luke Bisby

Infrastructure and Environment

This project is concerned with socially integrated mitigation of multiple structural risks in the urban environment, with a focus on the linked risks of earthquake and fire. Fire is the largest contributor to building damage following earthquakes. To date, this research area has largely been ignored as it crosses the boundaries between the knowledge areas of earthquake and fire safety engineering. The combination of factors adds to the challenges in risk estimation already existing in each distinct area. There is currently no universally accepted method for accounting for the effect of strengthening practices on building vulnerability to earthquakes (let alone earthquakes followed by fire). In the case of fire safety engineering, few credible techniques for damage estimation or risk-based design currently exist due to a lack of requisite input data. This project will develop, through large scale structural testing and computational analysis, new technical engineering solutions to these problems. And, for the first time, these technical engineering solutions will be developed explicitly accounting for the social context within which they are to be enacted.

Behaviour, attitutde and perception of safety risk in a nationally and culturally diverse workforce

Dr Simon Smith

Infrastructure and Environment

Considering the cultural and national backgrounds of construction workers and management to understand attitudes and perception of construction safety risk.

MacSeNet: Machine Sensing Training Network

Professor Mike Davies

Digital Communications

The aim of this Innovative Training Network is to train a new generation of creative, entrepreneurial and innovative early stage researchers (ESRs) in the research area of measurement and estimation of signals using knowledge or data about the underlying structure.

SpaRTaN: Sparse Representations and Compressed Sensing Training Network

Professor Mike Davies

Digital Communications

The aim of this Initial Training Network is to train a new generation of interdisciplinary researchers in sparse representations and compressed sensing, contributing to Europe’s leading role in scientific innovation.

Robust Repeatable Respiratory Monitoring in EIT

Professor Hugh McCann

Digital Communications

The project aims at developing a new electrical impedance tomography (EIT) device for medical use. This device, called ReMEIT, should enable 3D absolute conductivity image reconstruction. To achieve this goal the project intends to capture the exact positions of the measuring electrodes and the exact thoracic shape using an optical shape capture device. These are absolutely novel approaches in EIT imaging that, if successful, could represent an immense progress in EIT research and a big step towards reliable clinical use of this technology. The project partners not only plan to develop the device but they also propose a strategy for its validation under invivo conditions. At first, healthy volunteers with no history of lung disease will be examined by ReMEIT and, later, the EIT device will be applied in critically ill patients suffering from various pulmonary diseases. In the former case, reference data will be obtained by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in the latter one, routine chest X-ray, computed tomography (CT)and MRI data will be utilised.

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