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Imaging Elasticity of Advanced Engineering Materials

Project description

Seeing strength without breaking things

Understanding a material’s elasticity (stiff or flexible) is essential for designing everything from airplanes to bone implants. But today’s methods for measuring elasticity often damage the material or fail to capture the full picture. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ImagingElasticity project is developing a non-destructive way to image elasticity across a material’s surface, revealing how properties vary due to processing or design. This breakthrough will speed up the creation of advanced materials, including next-generation titanium alloys for implants. Using an innovative pairing of laser-acoustic imaging and a novel wave-propagation algorithm, the project promises not only faster insights but also better, longer-lasting biomedical devices. This will bring benefits for science, industry, and patient care.

Objective

ImagingElasticity is a project to develop, for the first time, a system to measure and image the elasticity of materials non-destructively. Determining elasticity of new material, typically a sample of a novel alloy or one innovatively fabricated, is crucial to understand its mechanical properties. Measuring local elasticity over a large area – imaging elasticity – is an important step forward, allowing to characterize its spatial distribution resulting from specialized treatments (typically heterogeneous thermal or mechanical processing) or specifically designed fabrication (e.g. additive manufacturing). The elasticity imaging will also provide a high-throughput characterization method, supporting rapid development of new materials.
Along with the development of the method, we will apply it to the progress of biomedical β-Ti alloys intended for bone implants. To achieve biomechanical compatibility, leading to higher duration of the implant, the implant’s stiffness (i.e. its elasticity) should be very low compared to typical values of metals – but the strength and wear resistance must remain high. There is extensive research to find the right chemical composition and processing, which will be significantly accelerated by the newly developed characterization method.
At the heart of this proposal is the use of a new technique for computing the solutions to the wave-propagation problem which the researcher has co-developed – the Ritz-Rayleigh method. This method will be adapted for the purpose and combined with spatially resolved acoustic spectroscopy (SRAS), a unique laser-ultrasonic method for localized measurement of surface acoustic wave velocity developed by the supervisor and his team. This pairing is ideal for the researcher’s career development (by acquiring new research skills supervised by experts in optics and soft skills at the host-institution courses) and also for the host group, leaving a long-lasting impact of the newly developed method.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Coordinator

THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM
Net EU contribution
€ 276 187,92
Address
University Park
NG7 2RD Nottingham
United Kingdom

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Region
East Midlands (England) Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire Nottingham
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost
No data
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