Profile

I’m a PhD student at Imperial College London. I live in Brixton and originally I’m from Bromley in south east London.

I am an avid PC gamer, my favourite games are Dark Souls, Fallout 3, The Witcher 3, Dead Space 2 and pretty much anything from the Battlefield series. I also love playing the guitar, going cycling and doing archery.

I’m also an enthusiastic home cook, my favourite thing to make for myself is a Brazilian/Portuguese dish called Feijoada.

I am studying something called creep crack growth. Creep is a type of deformation that occurs in metals only at high temperatures.

If a load is applied to a metal at above roughly one third of its melting temperature then it can keep on deforming, even if the load is not increased. If a metal keeps deforming in this manner then eventually a crack can begin to grow.

In my work I am trying to better understand the data that we get from carrying out creep crack growth tests on specimens in a laboratory so that we can predict how and when metals will crack in their operation life.

Results from a finite element analysis simulation

A finite element mesh of a specimen

Some of my results comparing the deformation of two specimens throughout a test

The experimental setup for one of the type of tests that I do

A specimen broken in half to show where the crack grew inside of it

A side on view of a crack, taken using an optical microscope

Given the state of the pandemic my workplace is currently my living room so my typical work day currently involves mostly sitting at my desk at home! I can do a lot of my work from my computer.

I might be running a simulation of how material deforms and fails using a method known as Finite Element Analysis, or I might be crunching data that I’ve collected in one of my experiments. At the moment I’m also spending a lot of time writing up my PhD thesis which is a massive report (200-300 pages!) that I have to submit in order to get my PhD.

I also do go into university occasionally to set up experiments. This involves tying temperature measurement equipment to my specimens, then installing them in a furnace and setting up other equipment to measure how much my samples deform in a test. I am working on creep which causes metals to deform really slowly, my tests normally take a month or more to finish, so I don’t go into the lab too often.