In an ideal world, a jet engine turbine blade would never crack, would never fatigue, would withstand as high a temperature as we can impose, and would be as light and as strong as we can imagine. In the real world, to take even partial steps towards such goals, we need a deep understanding of materials performance at many length and time scales. At nano and meso scales, the mismatch between elastic and plastic properties of each grain in a polycrystalline material results in local stress concentrations and in crack nucleation which eventually limits the life and performance of a design. Understanding the nature and the source of local stress heterogeneities and their impact on the macroscopic behaviour require development of numerical methods describing each length and time scale, approaches to bridge between methods, and the use or development of cutting edge experimental techniques to validate the numerical results. 

Our research focuses on the development of different numerical methods and on the linking of them to diffraction and image based experimental techniques. At MSDL we seek to explain the effects of various environments on the performance and integrity of polycrystalline materials.