Design and manufacturing

A major focus of the work is in relating functional requirements of different engineering systems to their performance characteristics through extensive use of state of the art modelling and optimisation techniques. A hallmark of much of this work is implementing these techniques to real world engineering problems and expanding the boundaries of their applicability. We have state of the art manufacturing facilities including rapid prototyping, robotics and metrology equipment and state of the art software. We interact closely with a number of research centres within Durham We have worked on industrial projects and have links with number of companies including: BMW, Rolls Royce, Nissan, Airbus, BAE Systems and Metris.

Ideas for PhD and MRes projects are in the list here.

Process modelling

Metal forming and welding process modelling by finite element analysis to optimise process design and to improve part quality.
This work focuses on the development of computational models representing manufacturing processes in real production. The models can be used to predict material failures caused by inappropriate process design and to quantify shape and dimensional errors of produced components.  The developed computational models consider effects of material thermo-elastic-plastic behaviour, interaction between tooling and workpiece, and variations of process parameters. Recent effort has been made on modelling of sheet metal spinning and the following diagram shows the modelling of material wrinkling failures in conventional spinning. Staff involved: Dr Hui Long.