B13: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Metallurgy and Materials

As one of the UK’s top materials engineering research centres, the OU is enhancing the lifespan and performance of safety-critical structures in a range of industries, benefiting the economy, public safety and society.

Research specialisms

• Fabrication and processing
• Residual stress
• High temperature behaviour
• Structural integrity

Headline results

• 85% of OU research was assessed as world-leading or internationally excellent (4* or 3*) for its overall quality
• 90% of OU research was assessed as world-leading or internationally excellent (4* or 3*) for its research outputs

Research highlights

The OU has developed the Contour Method of residual stress measurement and integrated it with non-destructive techniques providing a validated toolkit for application to aircraft structures in collaboration with the MoD, the US Air Force Research Laboratory, Airbus, BAE Systems and Alcoa, which has led to improvements in aerospace designs.

The OU led the £3.5m consortium which designed and built ENGIN-X, the world’s first neutron diffractometer to be optimised for engineering measurements. The Strain Scanning Software (SScanSS) the OU developed is installed at eight facilities worldwide and used by numerous multinational companies including General Motors, John Deere, Airbus, Tata Steel and Pacific Rail.