Dr Maria Lißner - University of Oxford

Research Fellowships 2024

Across industrial sectors like automotive, aerospace, and human protection, the demand for reliable and sustainable high-performance engineering solutions to create structures is rising because of environmental and long-term viability needs across industrial sectors, such as automotive, aerospace, and human protection. These solutions need innovative material and structural designs, with fracture and impact mechanics playing pivotal roles. Understanding the mechanics of material interfaces is vital for predicting failures in dynamic structures and realising lightweight, eco-friendly, and cost-effective designs. As more heterogeneous materials such as carbon fiber reinforced polymers, timber, adhesive joints, and additive manufacturing (AM) parts are used, there is a corresponding rise in component failures within interfaces (e.g., fibre-matrix or between layers). As these materials evolve, interfaces multiply, underscoring the importance of understanding interface mechanics, an area that is poorly understand currently.

Looking ahead, developing robust design tools for crafting custom structures from these materials is crucial. Yet, existing knowledge, encompassing experimental exploration and numerical modelling, falls short in discovering and understanding interface behaviour under dynamic loads and extreme conditions, leading to insufficient predictive models.

Dr Maria Lißner’s Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship centres on designing lightweight structures that endure extreme environments, such as crashes and impacts. By leveraging AM’s advantages, she aims to develop innovative experimental techniques and specimen designs for accurate evaluation of interface characteristics such as fracture energy. AM’s attributes – minimal waste, intricate structure formation, and defects and features replication found in real materials – are invaluable. Insights derived from this can be transferred to conventional materials such as composites. Coupling this with intelligent algorithms and enhanced computational power will boost precision, speeding up engineering design processes, assessments, and developments.

The impact of this research at the University of Oxford is significant, aiding material selection and optimisation for reliable, safe engineering solutions across industries, especially those emphasising sustainability and combating climate change. Techniques developed here are versatile, potentially applicable beyond this research's scope.

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