Adhesion and fracture; adhesion; contact mechanics; friction

Recently, Dalvi and co-authors have shown detailed experimental data of adhesion of soft spheres with rough substrates with roughness measured down to almost the atomic scale, finding that the Persson and Tosatti theory gave satisfactory predictions of the apparent work of adhesion during loading, once the increase of the surface area due to roughness is correctly computed at extremely small scales.

Specifically, the post requires expert knowledge in experimental and/or computational mechanics of materials and/or tribology. The position is part of a large international EPSRC-SFI funded project aimed at developing next generation textile triboelectric nanogenerators (or T-TENGs) for powering of wearable electronics.  This position will focus on the mechanics and tribology of T-TENGs and will involve both modelling and experimental work.