Welcome to the home pages of the Experimental Micromechanical Characterisation Research Group, including Dr Ben Britton and team.
We are a group of researchers specialising in materials science and engineering, primarily of metallic alloys and ceramic / metallic composites.
Our core focus is on understanding the properties and performance of materials in difficult and interesting environments, through development and use of tools that characterise the performance of microstructural components within materials.
Our work is primarily experimental, using novel techniques such as high angular resolution electron backscatter diffraction (HR-EBSD) and high spatial resolution digital image correlation (HR-DIC) to track strain and stress at the local scale. We use these to understand microstructural mechanisms and inform models to predict component performance. We also have a number of computational group members, using dislocation dynamics and crystal plasticity methods to understanding materials deformation. Finally, we develop new image processing algorithms to improve our characterisation tools.
We are based within the Engineering Alloys Group in the Department of Materials, at Imperial College London. The Department hosts a large range of sophisticated experimental kit that we use regularly. We also develop and maintain a number of software analysis tools that aid our experimental understanding of real alloy performance.
News:
08/04/2017 - AstroEBSD is launching. This is a new indexing code for EBSD analysis, based upon the Hough transform. We hope it will support community efforts to increase the rigour in EBSD analysis. You can find out a bit more about this project here.
27/03/2017 - the group now has a Code of Conduct for membership of the group.
13/03/2017 - Congratulations to Dr Giorgio Sernicola for successfully defending his thesis today!
11/01/2018 - Congratulations to Giorgio Sernicola for submitting his thesis today!
28/09/2017 - Welcome to Xinping who joins the group as a PhD candidate. Xinping will be studying strain partitioning in dual phase titanium alloys.
25/07/2017 - New paper on Ti brazing
Jing, Y., Su, D., Yue, X., Britton, T.B. and Jiang, J. "The development of high strength brazing technique for Ti-6Al-4V using TiZrCuNi amorphous filler" Materials Characterisation (2017)
24/07/2017 - New cracking work on measuring fracture energy using stable crack growth with in situ measurements
Sernicola, G., Giovannini, T., Patel, P., Kermode, J.R., Balint, D.S., Britton, T.B., and Giuliani, F. "In situ stable crack growth at the micron scale" Nature Communications (2017)
21/07/2017 - New paper combining TEM, micro-mechanical deformation and alloy development.
Knowles, A.J., Jun, T.S., Bhowmik, A., Jones, N.G., Britton, T.B., Giuliani, F., Stone, H.J., and Dye, D. "A new beta titanium alloy system reinforced with superlattice intermetallic precipitates" Scripta Mat (2017)
06/07/2017 - Ben's HR-EBSD tutorial talk is now available as a PDF over on the Techniques page
08/05/2017 - The Engineering Alloys Theme (our parent research grouping at Imperial) won an Imperial College President's Award for best Research Team. Ben also won an President's award as an Outstanding Early Career Researcher.
04/05/2017 - New paper on studying fine scale microstructure in Ti alloys - studied with transmission Kikuchi diffraction (TKD)
Tong, V., Joseph, S., Ackerman, A., Dye, D. and Britton, T.B. "Using transmission Kikuchi diffraction to characterise α variants in an α+β titanium alloy"
03/05/2017 - Congratulations to Vivian on graduating today! Her PhD focused on studying zirconium for nuclear applications. Vivian also won a prize for the best PhD in Materials Characterisation in the Department - very well done!
29/03/2017 - Alex talks about his journey into a PhD and shows off some of his neat card tricks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi6GHZjqU0k
For older news - view the archive