Today’s seminar from Professor Paul Weaver will take place in B27 room 2003 from 14:00-15:00.
Abstract
A structure should resist loads without failing. For structures that contain humans, i.e. houses, boats, cars, aeroplanes etc., they do not stretch (or deform) a great deal (thankfully!) and those that are required to move around should be lightweight to keep fuel costs down e.g. aeroplanes and superlightweight to overcome gravity (e.g. rockets, spacecraft). This seminar explores the possibility of using unusual properties of materials with some additional nonlinear geometric behaviour to either reduce mass or to achieve a significant shape change (morphing) of a structure. Examples are drawn from bicycles, aeroplanes, helicopters, rockets, wind turbine blades, my Ferrari (I wish!) and Nature.
Biography
Paul Weaver is a Chair in Lightweight Structures at the University of Bristol and and until recently was its Engineering Faculty Research Director. He also directs the ACCIS Centre for Doctoral Training. He has published in excess of 200 refereed papers, had 5 patents and graduated 25 PhD students. He has worked on composite structures since 1987, firstly at Newcastle University and what was then Courtauld’s Aerospace on his PhD, before joining Prof Mike Ashby and his group as a postdoc at Cambridge University. Paul then joined Bristol University in 1998, becoming an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow from 2002-2007 and then gaining his Chair in 2009. During this time Paul was a regular visitor and consultant to NASA Langley on buckling and postbuckling design methods of plate and shell structures. He has worked with Airbus on various projects since 1999 and has delivered methods for coupled stress/temperature modelling for what was then the A3XX, buckling solutions for anisotropic plates, optimisation methods for composite plates, design for stringer plate terminations and most recently on spatially variable stiffness composite plates under the ABBSTRACT project. His anisotropic blade concept for the BERP IV blade is flying on EH101 helicopters. More broadly, his work on morphing composites is being considered for use in wind turbine designs, F1 and high performance boats.