Establishing the vibration behaviour of structures is an important activity in design within the aircraft and other major industries. Many of these structures are modelled as plates and plate assemblies. The proposed research is focused on improving the capabilities of solving plate vibration problems accurately that will lead to more efficient design and manufacture of structures with improved vibration performance. A new method, called the dynamic finite strip method will be developed. This will be achieved by bringing together and getting the best out of three well-known existing methods, the dynamic stiffness, the finite strip and the finite element methods. An important feature of the new formulation will be the use of one-dimensional refined beam theories for both metallic and composite beams and extend them to the important cases of two dimensional structures such as plates to investigate the free vibration characteristics. In this work, a metallic or composite plate will be split into a number of strips represented by beams subjected to dynamic motion. The dynamic behaviour of the plate will be obtained by combining the behaviour of the individual strips where each strip is idealised as a beam undergoing dynamic motion. It is well known that symbolic computation is a powerful tool in manipulating complicated algebraic expressions often required in structural mechanics. Full advantage of this tool will be taken of when developing the new theory. An established algorithm developed by Wittrick and Williams in the early seventies (known as the W-W algorithm) will be extended for the new method and subsequently used as solution technique to obtain the result. Finally in order to verify the method, a wing box which is an important structural part of a transport airliner will be analysed for its dynamic properties.

This proposed project directly address one of the priority areas outlines in EC's Green Deal programme. The usage of textured solar cells to reduce the reflection from the air-solar cell interface, which ultimately enhances absorption, has been widely reported. There is a large number of texturing patterns available such as: pyramids, micropillars, nanowires, nanoholes, plasmonic, etc. The most commonly used patterns have been widely studied and have reached very high levels of optimisations. Nevertheless, these regular patterns have some degree of frequency dependence and hence only a narrow wavelength range optimisation, and thus limits the overall performance. Our preliminary study suggest that absorption efficiency can be further increased by at least 20%, by simply optimising the shape and periodicity of the nanowires. This proposal introduces an innovative combination of the patterns, both circular and noncircular nanowires, additionally including air-holes which increases the solar cell efficiency. Preliminary result also shows that by introducing an offset in the air-hole position, and thus breaking the symmetry, achieves an even higher conversion efficiency, but without increasing the fabrication cost, as simple single-stage mask can be used. By doing this, the improvement on the performance is expected to affect over the whole solar wavelength spectrum. Solar cells with a higher efficiency, but without increased fabrication cost can be a game changer, in supporting UN SDG7, affordable and clean energy. Through hands-on research, the Researcher of this project will enhance his knowledge and skills so can contribute to the European Research Area agenda.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.