Micromechanical Modelling and Experimentation

人类今天面临的最大挑战是能源供应的可持续性。重要的是开发对环境影响最小的可靠能源。此外，对于我们的运输系统，特别是航空航天，最有效地利用能源也很重要。经济上的挑战在于开发以现有能源为基础的可靠和高效的发电系统。实际上，这意味着核能，从长远来看，还有核聚变。这对材料工程研究的需求是为高温材料提供解决方案，以支持系统和工厂的改进大规模设计。与此类似，航空航天领域对减少排放和提高效率的要求意味着需要开发能够在比目前高得多的温度下提供所需性能的材料系统。为了解决这些问题，重要的是要对材料在负载和环境条件下的行为有更深入的了解，这些条件将在实践中经历。在该项目中，将开发一种完全集成的建模和实验方法，该方法将探索各种不同尺度的材料行为。从这些研究中获得的新见解将使我们能够开发出可用于工业环境的改进的基于物理的模型。为了实现我们的研究目标，我们还必须保持和进一步发展研究基地的专门知识，以应对这些苛刻的科学和技术挑战。这笔赠款的一个主要目标将是建立基础设施，使应对这些挑战所需的专门知识能够长期持续下去。这将涉及与其他主要国际学术团体发展伙伴关系。

The greatest challenges that face mankind today centre on sustainability of the energy supply. It is important to develop reliable sources of energy that that have minimal impact on the environment. Also, it is important for our transport system, particularly aerospace, to make the most efficent use of energy resources. The economic challenge lies in the development of reliable and efficient generation systems based on the available sources of energy. In practice this means nuclear power, and, in the longer term, fusion. The demand this places on materials engineering research is to supply solutions for high temperature materials that would underpin improved large scale designs for systems and plant. Siimilarly, the requirement to reduce emmissions and increase efficiency in aerospace, means that material systems will need to be developed that can deliver the required performance at much higher temperatures than at present.In order to solve these problems, it will be important to develop a more in-depth understanding of material behaviour under loading and environmental conditions that are representative of those that will be experinced in practice. In this project, a fully integrated approach to modelling and experimentation will be developed, which will explore the material behaviour across a range of different scales. The new insight developed from these studies will allow us to develop improved physically based models that can be used in an industrial envionment. Strong partnerships with industry will be important in achieving this goal.In order to achieve our research objectives we must also sustain and further develop the expertise of the research base that is required to tackle these demanding scientific and technological challenges. A major objective of this grant will be to create the infrastructure for the long term sustainability of expertise that will be required to meet these challenges. This will involve the development of partnerships with other leading international academic groups.