The School of Engineering

Profile

Jim is now retired and working part-time (0.2 pro-rata) purely on research. He was previously head of the Mechanical Behaviour of Materials Research (MBM) Group and research coordinator for the School. Working in close collaboration with Rolls-Royce, DSTL, QinetiQ and the USAF Wright Patterson Laboratory, he has achieved an international reputation for his work on fatigue and fracture mechanics of aero engine materials. He has obtained research funding of over £1M, supervised and examined numerous PhDs, and published and presented internationally for over 30 years.

He has collaborated widely on research with international partners including the Technical University of Lisbon (funded by NATO AGARD), the University of Coimbra, Berira Interior and Setubal in Portugal and the University of Siegen, Germany. This has included supervision of 4 Portuguese PhD students.

He is a past member of the British Standards committee on Fatigue Testing and has acted as consultant to a wide range of industrial companies on fatigue and fracture, failure analysis, material selection and design. He is co-author of text book on designing to avoid fatigue failure.

Together with his colleagues in the MBM group, Jim has recently completed major studies on fatigue under combined high and low cycle fatigue in aero engine aerofoil materials, as experienced during flight cycles, funded by the EPSRC and the USAF International Research Initiative. Work is ongoing on further aspects of this complex aspect of fatigue.The overall objective is to develop and bring together experimental, analytical and computational methods to model fatigue crack growth under realistic loading conditions.