On 5th June, PhD students from the Department of Materials came together to present and showcase their research to invited guests from industry as well as academic and research staff and fellow students.

Highlight of our annual research calendar, the day features our final year PhD students presenting to the entire audience of around 120 and our first and second year PhD students exhibit posters relevant to their research.

The theme for this year’s Research day was Biomaterials and our keynote guest speaker was Dr Gilda Gasparini from Lucideon whose presentation was entitled “Inorganic Material for Healthcare Applications”. Out of our seventeen final year PhD students presenting, five were on a Biomaterials theme, indicating the significance of this growing group of researchers within the department, represented with our research areas of Soft Matter and Processing.

Along with the formal presentations and poster showcase, students also entered microscopy and other research derived imagery in our “Scientific Visualisation Competition”. Prizes for all categories of entry, presentation, poster and imagery were awarded and these, as in previous years, were generously sponsored by ARTIS (Presentation and Poster prizes) and DNV-GL(Scientific Visualisation prizes).

Key to prize winners immage above: L to R

Avinash Prabakar, Sudhir Sharma, Prof Gary Critchlow, Ioannis Kouparitsas, Dr Mark Ashworth, Dr Tim Illson(DNV-GL), Vasilis Bagiatis, Wanwei Zhang, William Rowlands, Jordan Roe, Charles Brooker, John Siefert, Dr Davide Nocita, Martyn Bennett(ARTIS).

Prizewinners:

Best Presentation by a 3rd Year Research Student

1st John Siefert
2nd William Rowlands
3rd Wanwei Zhang

Best Poster by a 1st Year Research Student

1st Jordan Roe
2nd Sudhir Sharma

Best Poster by a 2nd Year Research Student

1st Ioannis Kouparitsas
2nd Charles Brooker

Best Poster by a Postdoctoral Researcher

1st Dr Davide Nocita
2nd Dr Han Jiang

Scientific Visualisation Competition

1st: Dr Mark Ashworth
Cosmic Dawn (pictured) - Optical microscope image showing the degradation of an oxide coating on an electroplated tin deposit
after exposure to elevated temperature and humidity (55°C and 85% relative humidity). Tin whiskers are observed
growing through the degraded oxide coating.

2nd: Avinash Prabakar
Weld Sculpturing - Band Contrast Image of Non-Autogenous Laser Welded extrusion aluminium alloy

Highly Commended: William Rowlands
Micrograph of a sintered complex barium titanate structure formed by additive manufacture. A high solids loading
aqueous paste was selectively deposited via micro-extrusion to form a functionally graded porous structure.
Several layers can be seen in this top-down image, each formed by a single extrude

Highly Commended: Vasilis Bagiatis
Failure mode of PMMA - Representative failure mode under shear loading of PMMA adherents bonded with RTV silicone after plasma treatment and tetraethylorthosilicate-based primer coating.

The quality of work presented this year showed the breadth and depth of research being conducted by our PhD students and is very impressive. We look forward to seeing the outcomes from their completed research!