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Infrastructure and Environment
Postgraduate
H.Zhang-125@sms.ed.ac.uk
2.11 Alexander Graham Bell Building
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Infrastructure and Environment
Postgraduate
s1663125@sms.ed.ac.uk
G.1 John Muir
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Infrastructure and Environment
Reader
mdias@ed.ac.uk
1.20 William Rankine Building
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Infrastructure and Environment
Dr Dias obtained his bachelor’s in physics at the State University of São Paulo, Brazil. Four years later, he commenced a MSc in theoretical physics from his alma mater. In 2012, he obtained his PhD degree from the University of Massachusetts, USA, where he researched on the mechanics of origami structures and growth mechanisms. Dr Dias has worked as a researcher on a broad range of topics in structural engineering and applied mathematics at Brown University School of Engineering (USA), Aalto University (Finland), and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics at KTH (Sweden). Before joining the University of Edinburgh, Dr Dias was an Associate Professor of mechanical engineering at Aarhus University in Denmark, where he lead his research group 'Mechanical Metamaterials and Soft Matter’.
- Ph.D. in Physics (2012), University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA
- M.Sc. in Physics (2007), Theoretical Physics Institute – IFT, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
- B.Sc. in Physics (2004), State University of São Paulo – UNESP, Rio Claro, SP, Brazil
- Theoretical mechancis
- Soft condensed matter physics
- Applied mathematics
- Differential geometry
- Dimensionally reduced models and structures (beams, rods, plates, and shells)
- Stability theory
- Mechanical metamaterials (Auxetic structures, origami, kirigami, etc)
- Biomechanics
- Fluid-structure interactions
Mankind cannot survive without potable water. Despite this, our potable water resources are becoming more polluted due to human activity (e.g., mining, industry and agriculture), rendering them unfit for consumption. Additionally, water scarcity is becoming more common with over 1/3 of the world’s population living in water stressed countries. In order to guarantee our survival, processes that allow obtaining clean potable water are crucial.
Nanofiltration (NF) membrane processes are increasingly popular as they supply high quality water, including drinking water, from water resources of varied quality. This process is commonly used in Scotland and Scandinavian countries, treating freshwater from lakes and reservoirs in order to produce drinking water. Membranes are however known to foul due to an accumulation of contaminants on the membrane surface which reduce quality and flow of permeated water, increasing operational and energy costs and reducing membrane life. Current cleaning regimes, which are mostly chemical based, are inefficient and they require process downtime. They can also modify the properties of the membrane, ultimately reducing its life.
This project will build upon our work [1, 2] focused on assessing and identifying which foulants and parameters affected membrane lifetime in water treatment in Scotland. The aim is to further understand fouling formation on the membrane surface, namely looking at the interplay between different relevant foulants like Natural Organic Matter, soluble and particulate Fe and Mn, as well as biofouling, in order to inform the design of more efficient cleaning strategies to prolong membrane life.
The research is rewarding and challenging, so applicants should have (or be close to obtaining) a 1st class or 2:1 honours degree (or equivalent) in Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Geosciences, Microbiology or a related subject.
Further information on English language requirements for EU/Overseas applicants.
Applications are welcomed from self-funded students, or students who are applying for scholarships from the University of Edinburgh or elsewhere
Competition (EPSRC) funding may be available for an exceptional candidate. Link below for the further details.
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Log jams - accumulations of floating wood in rivers - play a critical role in shaping fluvial landscapes, influencing flood dynamics, sediment transport, and aquatic ecosystems. Despite their ecological and hydraulic importance, we still lack a predictive, mechanistic understanding of how individual logs interact to form stable jams, how these structures resist or yield to flow, and how changes in geometry or hydrodynamic forcing drive transitions between clogging and release.
This project will address these questions using particle-based computational simulations of log jam formation and deformation under flow. You will develop and apply numerical tools to represent logs as interacting elongated particles within a fluid environment, capturing contact, friction, buoyancy, and hydrodynamic drag. By systematically varying log aspect ratio, size distribution, and flow conditions, you will identify the micro-mechanical origins of jam stability and quantify the conditions under which logs transition between mobile, jammed, and partially clogging states. Through this work, you will develop expertise in large-scale particle-based simulation, computational fluid dynamics, and the physics of granular and particulate systems.
You will learn to extract effective rheological and mechanical properties from microscale simulations, linking particle-scale processes to river-scale behaviour. The results will inform predictive models for log jam formation and stability, with implications for flood risk management, river restoration, and the design of nature-based engineering solutions.
This PhD project will be supervised by Dr Chris Ness (School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh) and will involve collaboration with academics from partner institutions.
Interested candidates are encouraged to contact the supervisor for more information (chris.ness@ed.ac.uk).
Website: https://christopherjness.github.io/
Contact: Dr Christopher John Ness(Chris.Ness@ed.ac.uk)
Minimum entry qualification- an Honours degree at 2:1 or above (or international equivalent) in a relevant science or engineering discipline, possibly supported by an MSc Degree
Further information on English language requirements for EU/Overseas applicants.
Applications are welcomed from self-funded students, or students who are applying for scholarships from the University of Edinburgh or elsewhere as well as self-funded students.
Funding may be available for an exceptional candidate. Link below for the further details.
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Suspensions of particles in liquid are found throughout nature and industry, for instance slurries, mudslides, chocolate, toothpaste, and ceramics. Understanding their flow properties is crucial to characterising engineering processes and describing the natural world. We are just beginning to unravel the dramatic influence that stress-controlled particle-particle interactions have on the flow behaviour when the liquid is Newtonian and the particles are hard, spherical and roughly monosized [1].
In reality these conditions are rarely met: particles are usually irregular, being elongated and having a broad size distribution, while suspending liquids are often ‘viscoelastic’. A crucial scientific question is: how do the combined microphysics of these particle-level details control the resulting flow behaviour? For many scenarios in the natural world and in industry, answering this question is key to engineering design and natural hazard mitigation.
- You will address this question using predominantly computational means, developing expertise in particle-based simulation, high performance computing, and data analysis;
- You will become an expert in rheological characterisation of complex fluids;
- Building upon codes developed in Edinburgh, you will implement particle-shape models to simulate bulk flow of suspensions of elongated particles.
- You will develop post-processing techniques to generate viscosity and microstructural measurements;
- Your work will improve our fundamental understanding and guide constitutive model development.
- You will gain real-world experience by collaborating with our industrial partners on a contemporary engineering challenge.
This computational project is supervised by Dr Chris Ness (School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh) and will involve regular interaction with experimentalists from academia and industry.
Interested candidates may contact the supervisor for further information (chris.ness@ed.ac.uk).
Website: https://christopherjness.github.io/
Contact: Dr Christopher John Ness(Chris.Ness@ed.ac.uk)
You can read more about the scientific work of my group here: https://christopherjness.github.io/papers
[1] Ness, Christopher, Ryohei Seto, and Romain Mari. The physics of dense suspensions, Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics 2022, 13:97-117 (https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031620-105938)
Minimum entry qualification- an Honours degree at 2:1 or above (or international equivalent) in a relevant science or engineering discipline, possibly supported by an MSc Degree
Further information on English language requirements for EU/Overseas applicants.
Applications are welcomed from self-funded students, or students who are applying for scholarships from the University of Edinburgh or elsewhere as well as self-funded students.
Funding may be available for an exceptional candidate. Link below for the further details.
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In the context of long-term monitoring applications, there are numerous structural states that exhibit similar behavior but cannot be generalized with a single model (whether data- or physics-based) due to the inherent time-variant nature of structural evolution (1). Addressing such scenarios necessitates methodologies with adaptable models that can capture the interdependencies between Environmental and Operational Variabilities (EOV) and Damage Sensitivity Features (DSF) at various stages of structural evolution. The challenge lies in determining when distinct structures can be considered pseudo-similar, thereby sharing the same underlying physical properties to better represent the dynamics and associated EOV dependencies (2). Similarly, the incorporation of physics-based models, with varying levels of fidelity, adds knowledge towards understanding structural changes, which is essential for incorporating interpretable constraints on DSF evolution.
In practice, there are two main Challenges: (i) Robust extraction of DSF for continuous monitoring which are insensitive to EOVs. These DSF should be interpretable during the entire evolution of the structural performance and they should be able to accommodate dimensionality and complexity reduction of their associated non-linear time-variant nature. (ii) And there is a need of developing measures to quantify and propagate uncertainty towards the estimation of future stages of the structure evolution.
Website: https://dgarciacava.github.io/
Contact: David Garcia Cava (david.garcia@ed.ac.uk)
(1) Garcia Cava D., Avedaño Valencia L. D., Movsessian A., Roberts C. and Tcherniak D., On explicit and implicit procedures to mitigate environmental and operational variabilities in data-driven structural health monitoring. Chapter in the Book on Structural Health Monitoring Based on Data Science Techniques. Structural Integrity, Springer, pp. 309-330, vol 21, Cury A., Ribeiro D., Ubertini F., Todd M.D. (eds). 2021 (DOI: doi.org/10.1007/978 − 3 − 030 − 81716 −9 15)
(2) Qu, K., Logan, A., Miller, M. and Garc´ıa Cava D., Multi-phase adaptive methodology for mitigating environmental and operational variability in slowly changing time-variant engineering structures. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 229:112494 , 2025. (DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.ymssp.2025.112494)
Minimum entry qualification- an Honours degree at 2:1 or above (or international equivalent) in a relevant science or engineering discipline, possibly supported by an MSc Degree. Applications are particularly welcome from candidates expecting to receive a first-class degree in mechanical engineering, physics, applied mathematics or a closely related subject.
Further information on English language requirements for EU/Overseas applicants.
Applications are welcomed from self-funded students, or students who are applying for scholarships from the University of Edinburgh or elsewhere as well as sel-funded students.
Competition (EPSRC) funding may be available for an exceptional candidate. Link below for the further details.
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This project aims to investigate the capabilities of adaptive structures that change their geometry and mechanical properties to accommodate operational loading and damage management. The core objective of this project is to engineer an adaptive structure that adjusts to the prescribed loading conditions. This adaptation is achieved by integrating local structures that accommodate stiffness variations along the global structure.
The local structures will change their geometry and shape in response to the applied loads, resulting in emergent properties in the main global structure (1). Analytical modeling of the local-structures will provide understanding and control for stiffness tailoring, which will translate into desirable mechanical properties in the main structure. The connection between global properties and local-structure geometry changes aims to be achieved by understanding the relationships between geometric parameters and vibration response.
The geometric nonlinearity induced by the local-structures may cause amplitude-dependent nonlinear dynamic responses (2). Thus, understanding the underlying physics in the coupling between local and global structures, along with the vibration response of the global structure, aims to facilitate feedback to passively control the mechanical properties of the structure. Consequently, this dynamic response leads to continuous shape and geometry modifications within the structure, ultimately enhancing its capacity to accommodate specified loading requirements more effectively. The adaptive structures will benefit operability by maximising structural capacity during service. Interests on: Structural mechanics and dynamics, Stochastic modelling and Uncertainty quantification.
Website: https://dgarciacava.github.io/
Contact: David Garcia Cava (david.garcia@ed.ac.uk)(1) Sundararaman, V., O’Donnell, M.P., Chenchiah, I.V., Clancy, G. and Weaver, P.M., 2023. Stiffness tailoring in sinusoidal lattice structures through passive topology morphing using contact connections. Materials & Design, 226, p.111649.
(2) Zhao, B., Thomsen, H.R., Pu, X., Fang, S., Lai, Z., Van Damme, B., Bergamini, A., Chatzi, E. and Colombi, A., 2024. A nonlinear damped metamaterial: Wideband attenuation with nonlinear bandgap and modal dissipation. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 208, p.111079.
Minimum entry qualification- an Honours degree at 2:1 or above (or international equivalent) in a relevant science or engineering discipline, possibly supported by an MSc Degree. Applications are particularly welcome from candidates expecting to receive a first-class degree in mechanical engineering, physics, applied mathematics or a closely related subject.
Further information on English language requirements for EU/Overseas applicants.
Applications are welcomed from self-funded students, or students who are applying for scholarships from the University of Edinburgh or elsewhere as well as self-funded students. *Competition (EPSRC) funding may be available for an exceptional candidate but please note you must be a UK student or an EU student who has lived in the UK 3+ years
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