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 Supervisorsort descending Research Institutes Project Summary
Fire-fighting underventilated fires

Dr Ricky Carvel

Infrastructure and Environment

Working with the fire brigades, and using a small-scale experimental apparatus to define appropriate fire-fighting responses to underventilated fires in sealed or partially sealed compartments. 

Fire Safety of Modern Timber Infrastructure

Dr Rory Hadden

Infrastructure and Environment

Exposed structural timber elements within a compartment creates an additional fuel load which must be considered in design. This research focuses on quantifying this additional fuel load, and understanding conditions where after burnout of the compartment contents, the additional exposed timber may stop burning (auto-extinguish). 

Multi-scale analyses of wildland fire combustion processes

Dr Rory Hadden

Infrastructure and Environment

Low intensity prescribed fires are often employed in forests and wildland in order to manage hazardous fuels, restore ecological function and historic fire regimes, and encourage the recovery of threatened and endangered species. Current predictive models used to simulate fire behavior during low-intensity prescribed fires (and wildfires) are empirically-based, simplistic, and fail to adequately predict fire outcomes because they do not account for variability in fuel characteristics and interactions with important meteorological variables. Experiments are being carried out at scales ranging from the fuel particle, to fuel bed, to field plot and stand scales, with an aim of better understanding how fuel consumption is related to the processes driving heat transfer, ignition and flame spread, and thermal degradation through flaming and smouldering combustion, at the scale of individual fuel particles and fuel layers. Focus is placed on how these processes, and thus fuel consumption, are affected by spatial variability in fuel particle type, fuel moisture status, bulk density, and horizontal and vertical arrangement of fuel components, as well as multi-scale atmospheric dynamics.

Modelling and management of distribution networks using high-resolution synchronised measurements

Dr Sasa Djokic

Energy Systems

This project will develop improved methodologies and tools for assessing and providing more detailed information on complex system-user interactions, which will be further implemented in an integrated framework for system state identification, system or plant/component condition assessment and evaluation of the overall system performance (all currently performed in a number of separate studies).

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.

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.

GECOMPL: Generalised Continuum Models and Plasticity

Dr Stefanos Papanicolopulos

Infrastructure and Environment

The GECOMPL project aims to enable wider adoption of generalised plasticity models in practical applications. More specifically, the project proposes a detailed study of the formulation of both existing and new elastoplastic constitutive laws in the framework of generalised continua, leading to a better understanding of the different possible constitutive models and providing both the necessary theoretical basis and the appropriate numerical tools needed to use generalised continuum models in describing elastoplastic behaviour.

Finite element implementation and detailed comparison of generalised plasticity models

Dr. Stefanos Papanicolopulos

Infrastructure and Environment

The lack of an internal length scale parameter in classical continua leads to unrealistic numerical modelling of some phenomena related to the microstructure of the material such as size effect and strain localisation.

A multi-scale analysis of the influence of particle shape on the mechanical response of granular materials

Dr. Stefanos Papanicolopulos

Infrastructure and Environment

The principal aim is to characterise the flow properties of dense granular systems. In particular, the influence of different particle-shape representation techniques in the Discrete Element Method (DEM) is assessed. Additionally, experiments in a silo centrifuge device to determine the bulk response of granular assemblies under realistic stress states are being carried out. This work is part of T-MAPPP (Training in Multiscale Analysis of multi-Phase Particulate Processes), an FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network (https://www.t-mappp.eu).

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.

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