Seminar Schedule – Summer 2018
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Time: 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Place: WRW 102
Measuring and Modelling the Dynamic Behaviour of Structural and Biological
Hari Arora, Swansea University
Explosions, ballistic and impact scenarios form very different types of threat. In recent conflicts improvised explosive devices have provided a complex threat against which to mitigate. Survivors show complex and life-changing injuries. Creating models of injury enable mechanistic understanding of injury development, exploring the independent and dependent relationship between different threats. The same applies to structural materials and armours � knowledge of failure mechanisms delivers progressive design. New materials are continually being developed for improved impact tolerance and performance in extreme environments.
Our work has so far focused on two main areas: structural blast and ballistic loading of composites for naval applications; and soft tissue biomechanics focussed on blast lung injury. These are two very different problems and pose challenges towards experimentation, instrumentation and modelling. We have used methods such as: image correlation, volume correlation, high-speed photography, in situ structural monitoring, pre- and post-damage inspection, x-ray tomography imaging and computational modelling to map the time history from blast incident to residual mechanics in both structural materials and biomaterials. Several case studies will present the efficacy of translating such methods from traditional mechanical engineering applications towards biomaterials.
Hari is a Senior Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering at Swansea University. He did his undergraduate studies 2004-2008 in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London, where he also later completed his PhD titled “Blast loading of fibre reinforced polymer composite structures”. He worked in the Mechanics of Materials Section and Soft Solids Group at Imperial 2011-2013 as a postdoc, completing computational and experimental projects related to impact, nonlinear material behaviour and fracture.
In 2013, he was awarded a Research Fellowship funded by The Royal British Legion and Imperial College London to study Lung Mechanics in the Department of Bioengineering and The Centre for Blast Injury Studies. Here, he developed his research area focused on creating optimised protection strategies against injury, through characterisation of human body biomechanics in trauma. He currently works as part of the Zienkiewicz Centre for Computational Engineering at Swansea University on both the biomechanics and protective materials aspects of blast.
For further information, please contact Dr. Manuel Rausch at manuel.rausch@utexas.edu or (650) 283-0262.
