Details

This project began in December 2009, following on from many succesful previous investigations into wave dispersion phenomena by members of the CMD research group. Working with a wider group of academics including Dr William Parnell in Manchester and three other PhD students on the Leverhulme Trust funded project entitled “The influence of microstructure on wave and front propagation through heterogeneous media”, the project will look to investigate the effect of multi-physics effects upon wave dispersion.

Inhomogeneous materials (whose properties vary as a function of space) are ubiquitous in the world around us. Understanding their material behaviour in a dynamic context is important for many applications in which materials are subjected to complicated dynamic loadings. This understanding can be exploited to control the dynamic properties of materials, e.g. the design of so-called ``stop bands'' (bands of frequencies that are not able to propagate through a material or structure) and the way that fronts propagate through materials.
The role of microstructure is central to the dynamic performance of the material. All materials possess some kind of microstructure (i.e. crystals in metals, fibres in natural materials such as timber and bone, or the laminae of layered composites), and the particular material properties of the constituents as well as their geometric arrangement are important aspects that determine how the material behaves.

This project will focus on developing numerical models for front and wave propagation through inhomogeneous media.  Multi-physics effects such as thermo-elasticity will be considered. These numerical models will then be compared with analytical models developed by the team based at the University of Manchester.