Profile

I develop high strength and high ductility steels for the automotive industry. At the moment I am also studying for a PhD (sponsored fully by Tata Steel) at Manchester University. The aim of my PhD is to see whether the way chemical elements are distributed in a steel after casting has an effect on the mechanical properties (it does). The thing I really love about my job is that every answer raises even more questions about how the material really works and how we can apply that knowledge to making products (in this case for cars) even lighter and safer. The crash resistance of a car isn’t only dependent upon the strength though, it also depends on how ductile the material is (ductile means how much you can pull it apart before it breaks). This is really handy because it allows car makers to put groovy curves and folds into their cars without losing too much of the handy crash resistant properties.

I’m also looking at new ways to improve the strength of steel at high temperatures. You might have heard of the twin towers that collapsed after some people flew aeroplanes into them. The reason they collapsed was that the steel supports lost their strength as a result of the fires in the building. What I am aiming to do is increase the strength at high temperature so that people have got more time to get out of a building that’s on fire, before it collapses.

I try to arrange my day so that I do things at the best time. I’m usually quite alert in the morning, so that’s the time to get reports written, analyse data and read articles. After lunch is a bit of a dead time and I start to get a bit slow, so I usually try to arrange a meeting, or do some work in the lab to keep me active. The type of lab work I do is chopping specimens up to look at them, looking at specimens using a microscope or using x-rays, pulling specimens apart using a large tensometer and measuring them up. Sometimes I get to watch the technicians making the material  such as casting liquid metal into moulds, rolling the slabs at high temperatures etc. and heating the material to get the right type of structure. They don’t let me near any of that sort of equipment because (a) I haven’t been trained to use it and (b) I’d probably break something or hurt someone (probably me).

If there’s time I try to squeeze in a meeting to talk about my results (or someone else’s) and to talk about what kind of things we want to look at next. This can also be with scientists from other companies or universities, which can be very interesting because scientists from universities think differently about a problem than scientists from industry.