Metamaterials and Morphing Submarine Structures PhD

Application deadline: 01/09/2022

Cranfield Campus start date: 26 September 2022   

Fee status of eligible applicants: UK

Sponsored byEPSRC and BAE Systems Submarines, this studentship will provide a bursary of up to £18,000 (tax free) plus fees* for four years            

The PhD is fully funded and sponsored by EPSRC and BAE Systems Submarines. The PhD will provide a great research opportunity to study innovative designs, simulations and experiments of large strain metamaterial skins with great dimensional stability for integration with morphing submarine structures.

Morphing technology continuously receives interest from world leading aerospace industries to address sustainability and mobility challenges. Morphing structures, as a biologically inspired design, have an intelligent ability of optimizing their shape in operation using distributed sensors and actuators.  The radical continuous shape change attained by morphing technology enhances fluid flow effectiveness and could offer significant improvements in the performance of land vehicles or marine vessels, such as reduced fuel consumption and noise, as well as enhanced manoeuvring capabilities. However, the requirements for morphing structures are conflicting; the structure must be stiff to withstand the external loads, but flexible to enable shape changes, without a negative impact on the weight, complexity and reliability of the morphing systems.

This research project intends to create innovative lightweight mechanical metamaterials with sustained ZPR under large deformations. Large strain ZPR is very important as it leads to longer-life design through low critical stress, while bearing high strains under working loads. This eliminates undesired transverse deformations and curvatures for complex geometries and boundary conditions. This research will resolve these major problems of existing materials and structures for submarine morphing technology.

The research plan contains three Work Packages (WPs), and is expected to publish at least one high quality journal paper and a conference presentation from each of the WPs:-

• Design and Shape optimisations of the large strain Mechanical Metamaterials
• Experiments and Simulations of Mechanical Metamaterials
• Integration of Metamaterials with Morphing Submarine Structures and Proof of concept demonstration; (Importance is given to marine environment such as wave effects, hydrostatic pressure and sea water interaction.)

BAE Systems are important industrial partners of this project. Their world leading expertise and HI-TECH facilities in manufacturing advanced materials technologies will help the success of this project. This research supports strategic aspirations of BAE Systems. Their partnership and collaboration benefit this research through sharing experiences on the progress and direction of work as well as providing industrial scale research facilities to help de-risk the exploitation of the prototypes and develop new large scale prototypes with advanced manufacturing techniques. These long-term partnerships increase the impacts of this research.

Entry requirements

Applicants should have a first or second class UK honours degree or equivalent in a related discipline. This project would suit an applicant who is self-motivated and has good communication skills. The applicant would also have the following skills:

Design and Optimization

Finite Element Simulation

Manufacturing Methods

Experimental Analysis

How to apply

For further information please contact:
Name: Dr Iman Dayyani
Email: [email protected]

If you are eligible to apply for this studentship, please complete the online application form on our website .