Sadly John Bouchard has had to relinquish his role as research co-ordinator for the Systems Performance Centre, as he will be taking up a new position of Professor in Materials for Energy at the Open University. John writes - In particular it has been rewarding to be at the heart of developing the SPC and to see it flourish. I confident that the SPC has sufficient momentum to grow and make substantial contributions to knowledge in the nuclear sector.
John was awarded a Royal Society Industry Fellow, allowing him to join the Faculty of Engineering. This allowed 50% of his time to be dedicated to his Royal Society Fellowship at Bristol. This was a unique opportunity to collaborate in research with the Solid Mechanics Group, to nurture the new Research Alliance between British Energy and the University of Bristol and to co-ordinate research activities at the recently launched Systems Performance Centre.
We like to wish John our best wishes and good luck in the future. We welcome Peter Budden from British Energy who will take over John's role as research co-ordinator.
New projects within the UoB fully supported by BE and the new people working on these projects are;
'Effect of Fabrication History on the life of welded Components', A Great Western research Alliance PhD. The postgraduate working on this project is Bo Chen; having graduated from the Department of Material Science and Engineering in Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics on 2007. His research interests now are high temperature creep behaviour and fracture of engineering materials, residual stresses at different length-scales and their influence on creep damage, structural integrity assessment. Recently, the most interested field is the combined effect of plastic strain, triaxial residual stresses and microstructure degradation on creep fracture of stainless steels.
International visitor: Dr Tie Chang from GMRI, Hefei, China. Dr Yang is comparing different Structural Integrity Assessment Standards. This is a project involves examining fatigue, fracture and creep damage of metallic materials and risk based inspection. and failure analysis of pressure vessels Risk-based inspection of pressure vessels and pipeline. Dr Tie Yang is a visiting fellow who has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Zhejiang University, China and is a Senior Engineering Project Manager at Hefei General Machinery Research Institute (GMRI) National Safety Engineering Technology Research Centre for PVP
Also "Reliability of Degraded Structural Systems under Changing Operational Conditions" which is part of an Engineering Doctorate in Systems Engineering based at British Energy being undertaken by Marc Chevalier. The goal of this research is to develop a class of reliability models that can be applied to structural systems allowing a better understanding of the plant condition. This is for use in plant management and the underpinning of safety cases. Before starting the EngD in Systems in October 2007 Marc had completed an MSci in Physics, also from the University of Bristol, specialising in Particle Physics.