Continuum mechanics & industrial mathematics

Research in the Continuum Mechanics and Industrial Mathematics (CMIM) group focuses on the mathematical description of processes that are of key importance to many industrial companies.

Our current research

The research group is focused on using various mathematical approaches to bring new scientific insight to problems in manufacturing, medicine, geology, and beyond. The group’s research is multidisciplinary, with members having expertise in continuum mechanics, material science, fluid dynamics, and mathematical modelling in general, leading to collaborations with physicists, engineers, chemists and a range of industrial partners, and is directly relevant to Strathclyde’s strategic research themes in Advanced Manufacturing & Materials, Energy, and Measurement Science & Enabling Technologies.

Theme: Fluid Mechanics

Advances in the understanding of fluid mechanics arising from the group’s work are relevant to a wide range of industrial applications, especially those underpinning manufacturing. Particular strength lies in applications concerning droplets, coating and wetting processes, led by Wilson. For example, group members are currently collaborating with different divisions of Merck on methods for manufacturing liquid crystal displays and developing and analysing mathematical models for the drying of droplets arising in the manufacturing of Organic Light Emitting Diode displays via industrially supported studentships, and have extensive collaborations with experimental groups in Durham and Edinburgh.

Theme: Liquid Crystals

Strathclyde has a proud record in the development and mathematical analysis of theories of liquid crystal materials. Group members currently work on wide-ranging modern challenges in liquid crystal modelling e.g. theory of nematic defects, liquid crystal device design, new composite liquid crystal-based materials

Theme: Wave Propagation

The research in this area covers a wide range of topics, from numerical modelling of microwave imaging in medical applications to non-destructive evaluation in ultrasonics. Researchers have collaborations with major pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, with whom they have developed a novel inverse-problems approach to improving their production-line sensing of drug crystallisation. We are pioneering novel research in the area of ultrasonic tomography and experimental design for industry (with formal support from EDF, National Physical Laboratory (NPL), National Nuclear Laboratory, Rolls Royce, OnScale and IHI) and developing extensions to this work for inspection of additive manufacturing processes with a multi-disciplinary team based at the Advanced Forming Research Centre (AFRC), the Centre of Ultrasonic Engineering (CUE), and Georgia Institute of Technology.