Surrey coordinates €4.2m MATHEGRAM programme
The University is part of a pan-European, multidisciplinary consortium aimed at exploring how granular materials behave, with the aim of broadening their applications in industry.
Surrey’s Department of Chemical and Process Engineering will coordinate the H2020 programme MATHEGRAM, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovation Training Network which will fund 15 Early Stage Researcher (ESR) projects.
The MATHEGRAM consortium is made up of the University of Surrey, Airbus Defence and Space GmbH, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Johnson Matthey Plc, University of Salerno, DCS Computing GmbH, Centre Internacional de Metodes Numerics a l’Enginyeria, Imperial College London, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Tu Graz.
MATHEGRAM aims to improve our understanding of the thermomechanical behaviour of granular materials such as soils, agricultural seeds, metallic and ceramic powders and pharmaceutical powders, which have many industrial applications. In particular, the research will look at how temperature can affect granular materials, and explore how the materials’ properties can effectively be used for applications such as additive manufacturing and powder coating.
The 15 ESR projects will be based across the consortium partners, beginning in January 2019. Two of these projects – ‘DEM modelling of heat generation induced by friction’ and ‘Heat generation and transfer in food and pharmaceutical materials’ – will be hosted at Surrey.
Professor Charley Wu, who will be coordinating the programme, commented: “MATHEGRAM will further consolidate the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering’s international research and training collaboration in granular materials, formulation and product engineering, as well as modelling and simulations. Granular materials are expected to find much wider application in emerging areas at a wide temperature range when the underlying physics is better understood through this research programme.”
Find out more about Mathegram ESR projects.