Queen to open new dynamics laboratory

The University of Bristol's new GBP 18.5 million research facility, BLADE (Bristol Laboratory for Advanced Dynamics Engineering), will be opened on Friday 25th February by Her Majesty The Queen.

The University of Bristol's new GBP 18.5 million research facility, BLADE (Bristol Laboratory for Advanced Dynamics Engineering), will be opened on Friday 25th February by Her Majesty The Queen, who will be accompanied by His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh.

BLADE is located in the Queen's Building, the Faculty of Engineering's base in University Walk.

The original building was opened by Her Majesty The Queen on 5th December 1958 and has now been extended with two new, superbly equipped laboratory buildings.

BLADE is playing a major role in developing the next generation of engineering systems.

Aeroplanes, helicopters, bridges, buildings - these and many other systems have to meet ever-higher specifications.

They must be stronger, lighter, more reliable under variable conditions and less harmful to the environment.

By bringing together leading academics from a range of disciplines and adopting a "whole lifecycle" approach - from analysis and design to construction and performance monitoring - BLADE is seeking to address these challenges.

Aerospace engineers, civil engineers, computer scientists, engineering mathematicians, electrical engineers and mechanical engineers are pooling their expertise in the quest for practical solutions.

Professor Eric Thomas, Vice-Chancellor of the University, said: "This is probably the most advanced facility of its type in Europe and is helping to place the university and the city among the world leaders in this vital area of research, analysis and experiment".

The multidisciplinary philosophy behind BLADE is also helping to reduce the possibility of engineering failures.

Every year, thousands of lives are lost and billions of pounds wasted when materials, components and assemblages fail.

Aircraft losses, petrochemical industry disasters and earthquake damage are among the most devastating consequences of such failures.

The estimated annual cost of engineering failures across the world is GBP 40 billion.

At BLADE, researchers can undertake precisely controlled experiments to find out how structures and systems behave under extreme conditions.

They can test anything from individual composite fibres to entire concrete beams and aircraft structures to the limits of their performance and expose any weaknesses long before the components and systems are put into service.

Funding worth GBP 15 million for BLADE came from the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Office for Science and Technology.

The university itself committed a further GBP 3.5 million.

Research at BLADE is carried out in six main laboratories.

The Earthquake and Large Structures Laboratory is one of the leading laboratories of its kind in the world.

It is a four-storey test hall with a 15m by 8m strong floor and 15m high strong walls.

Structures weighing up to 15 tonnes can be tested to destruction on the EPSRC-funded Earthquake Simulator, or shaking table.

Smart control electronics and powerful hydraulic actuators are able to recreate the conditions of even the most violent earthquakes on this 3m square, cast aluminium platform.

The University has a multidisciplinary approach to earthquake engineering, with contributions at all levels to the concept-design-development-evaluation cycle.

Rapid computing, sophisticated mathematical models and advanced control methodologies are fully integrated with the latest multi-axial experimental facilities.

Control engineering plays an important role in the BLADE project.

The main purpose of the Automatic Control and Test Laboratory is to provide advanced automatic control, combined with novel dynamic test procedures, for the rest of BLADE as well as for other institutions and industry.

A key application is the adaptive control of the EPSRC shaking table and other materials test facilities.

To test structures with particular earthquake signatures, researchers need to ensure that the table's hydraulic actuators produce the correct six-dimensional motion.

Control research in Bristol ranges from the development of adaptive algorithms to applications in areas as diverse as the control of AC induction motors and the bifurcation tailoring of fighter aircraft.

Other projects include active engine mount development (a technology to develop quieter cars), the adaptive control of servohydraulics, and the control of flow behaviour in fluidised beds.

Work in the Modelling and Simulation Laboratory focuses on ways to better understand and design complicated engineering systems.

Researchers here are developing analytical and computational tools for modelling and simulation.

The research concentrates on nonlinear systems, that is, systems whose outputs are not proportional to their inputs.

The time dependent behaviour - the dynamics - of even simple nonlinear structures can be unpredictable and highly counter-intuitive.

The flip-side is that more extensive and poorly understood systems, for example, traffic flow on a motorway, might have simple emergent behaviour such as traffic jams.

BLADE researchers are using nonlinear dynamics techniques in applications ranging from resonant vibrations in cable-stayed bridges to the chaotic failure of micro and nanoscale devices.

Understanding the performance of materials under different environmental conditions is crucial for designing complex and advanced engineering systems.

The Environmentally Controlled Materials Laboratory houses advanced testing equipment for soil dynamics and advanced materials testing.

The temperature and humidity control ensures instrument stabilisation and enables high-precision testing and measurement.

Experimental rigs are used to test granular soils and engineering alloys.

This allows researchers to predict the soil behaviour of civil engineering structures, such as dams and tunnels, and the performance of materials in complex engineering components, such as gas turbines.

Research in the Heavy and Light Materials Test Laboratory focuses on the development and testing of structures and materials using both computational and experimental approaches.

Much of the work is focused on fibre reinforced composites and advanced engineering alloys, and spans a broad spectrum from the development of novel materials, investigation and modelling of fundamental material and structural behaviour, through to design and analysis of aerospace structures using advanced materials and concepts.

A particular area of expertise is the study of damage development under fatigue loading, a matter of great concern to, for example, the aircraft industry.

The laboratory's range of test machines enables researchers to test anything from single fibres up to large carbon fibre reinforced concrete beams.

The Dynamics Laboratory is a two-storey-high test hall, measuring 15m by 8m in plan, for the integrated testing of small to medium size aerospace and mechanical engineering structures.

Tests on full-size components are combined with computer simulations in a hybrid testing approach called dynamic substructuring.

Research carried out here includes the study of the vibration properties of a helicopter fuselage.

The mechanical interaction between the fuselage and the rotor is important, but very expensive and dangerous to test in flight.

The new facility allows for large sections of a helicopter - such as the entire tail - to be vibrated with a state of the art, multichannel dynamic test system in order to determine the many natural frequencies and mode shapes of its complex structure.

The experimental data is then compared with finite element computer models.

As opposed to the testing of scale models, dynamic substructuring promises a significant improvement in realistic laboratory testing.

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