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Kirigami is the sister of the more well-known origami. While origami focuses on creating art out of folding paper, kirigami extends this to allow for cuts to be introduced. Both origami and kirigami have been researched extensively over the last decade to explore potential applications in structural engineering. For example, when a parallel matrix of…

Aircraft wings are designed for the worst-case scenario encountered during a service lifetime. Generally, this is a severe gust that occurs only a handful of times but produces significant bending stresses at the wing root to require substantial reinforcement. Because the aircraft spends the majority of its lifetime not experiencing such a rare, extreme load…

A PhD student I am co-supervising (Abdirahman Sheik Hassan) has just published his first paper—a review on multi-rotor wind turbines. To extract more and more energy from the wind, turbine blades are getting longer and longer. This scaling places significant challenges on the materials, manufacturing, testing, transportation, operation, and maintenance of the blades. With blades…

I have just published a new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A with collaborators at IIT Hyderabad (India). Thin-walled cylinders are used in various engineering applications ranging from fuselages in aircraft to fuel tanks in launch vehicle stages. When thin-walled cylinders are compressed, they are susceptible to buckling and this occurs at…