The Development of Novel High-Performance Advanced Microstructured Materials and their Associated Continuum Models

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This is an extension of the Fellowship: 'NEMESIS' (New Mathematics for Materials Modelling in the Engineering Sciences and Industrial Sectors).Advanced materials sit at the heart of modern technology and are at the forefront of many improvements in quality of life. Key to enhancing material properties is a deep understanding of the link from microstructure to macroscale properties. This requires a diverse range of science including theoretical modelling, computational simulation and experimentation. This Fellowship Extension project sits at the triple point of these approaches and principally, uses the experience of the team, in particular in advanced mathematical modelling in order to design new materials for a range of applications. Three themes will be considered, "Reinforced syntactic foams", "Acoustic metamaterials" and "Thermal metamaterials" and a programme of Public Engagement will illustrate the research to a wide audience. Syntactic foams offer stiff, lightweight materials with strong recoverability, even after significant loading. This theme will investigate the ability of reinforcements including families of 2D materials and other micro and nano fillers in order to enhance stiffness whilst maintaining weight and recoverability. Iteration between models and experiments will ensure that optimise properties are determined. Applications are in marine structures, although a very well-publicised use of syntactic foams was in the football used in the 2006 world cup!Acoustic metamaterials are providing us with new way to manipulate sound. This theme builds on the recent work of the principal investigator's team where, together with an industrial partner he developed and subsequently built microstructured materials that were able to simultaneously slow down sound and also ensure that sound could penetrate the structure. This is a highly non-trivial task and the realisation of such a medium means that it can now potentially be employed in applications where it is important to manipulate sound. Classical examples are in sound attenuation devices, which using this approach could be made more compact. This theme will therefore look to better the designs using more complex microstructures and utilise the medium in more complex geometries. Thermal metamaterials are new media that look to manipulate heat flow and temperature fields. Research so been to direct thermal fields so that regions of space fare protected from high temperatures. In many applications associated with thermal efficiency, it is important to ensure uniform temperature distributions in electronic devices or regions of space within those devices. This is difficult to achieve in complex geometries. This project will look to design and realise new thermal metamaterials whose aim is to be deployed in specific complex geometries in order to ensure thermal uniformity and therefore enhanced heat dissipation and thus improved energy efficiency.The public engagement theme will use results from the original Fellowship of the PI, together with new results from the Extension in order to devise a programme of public engagement with the specific remit of widening participation in Mathematics, Science and Engineering. This will be achieved by devising talks and events aimed at School children, using stands and exhibitions at Science fairs, national competitions and web and social media presence in order to reach out to as broad a community as possible. This inter-disciplinary project is ideal for this in the sense that it sits many academic fields, with its core in Applied Mathematics but employing ideas from Materials Science, Chemistry, Engineering and Physics in order to achieve its goals.