Research Updates

It has been a busy few weeks with ILAS 2019 on 20th and 21st March, where I presented a talk on “Toughening Ceramics with Laser Shock Peening”. The time spent at the conference was quite useful with several key links reignited and new prospects for research coming through..

The week commencing 1st April was busy too with Dr Ing. Ann Zammit and three undergraduate engineering students Luana Bonnici, Isaac Camilleri and Greta Grima visiting Coventry University and the University of Wolverhampton in the UK.

The trip was organised by Dr Pratik Shukla and included visits to the various impressive automotive and aerospace laboratories within both University, and UNIPART - a company which manufactures automotive components and also the Transport Museum in Coventry.

The group also saw the laser shock peening process, a surface treatment used to impart beneficial compressive residual stresses and enhance the fatigue strength using high-energy pulses.

Laser shock peening (LSP) is a current active research area within the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Engineering - University of Malt. This collaboration has been ongoing since 2015.

From right to left: Greta Grima, Isaac Camilleri, Luana Bonnici, Dr Ing. Ann Zammit and Dr Pratik Shukla.

Visit to University of Wolverhampton with Team from Malta and Dr. Kiran Gulia on my left, Dr Bama Perumal on my right and Prof. Mark Stanford.

The Malta Council for Science and Technology Internationalisation Partnership Awards Scheme 2018 funded this visit.

On the same topic of LSP, I am now preparing for a talk tomorrow (7th April 2019) on “Laser Shock Peening activities in the Laser Engineering and Manufacturing Research Group at Coventry University” at the Laboratoire PIMM, CNRS – Arts et Métiers – CNAM in Paris to visit academic in the laser shock physics group..

First slide of my talk at the Shock Physics Laboratory at the Arts et Métiers – CNAM in Paris on 8th April 2019.