Professor Phil Irving
Head of Damage Tolerance Group, CAA Chair in Damage Tolerance
Location: Building 88, Cranfield campus
E: p.e.irving@cranfield.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)1234 754129
Manufacturing and Materials
Current activities
Lecturing
- Professor Phil Irving currently lectures to a range of masters courses on fatigue and damage tolerance topics in both the School of Applied Sciences and the School of Engineering, taking students for individual supervision from both schools for their individual research projects under the general topic of aircraft structural integrity.
Research - current projects include:
- Bonded crack retarders: he is the project leader on a large multi university-industry collaboration to explore new concepts in damage tolerant and fail safe structure design in which straps of metal or fibre composite are bonded to the structure in strategic areas to inhibit or retard fatigue cracks
- Transformation of defects into cracks; this work is investigating the transformation of defects such as scratches ands corrosion pits into fatigue cracks under service loading. The research is one of the few exploring behaviour in the pre-fracture mechanics region where a crack does not yet exist, but the structure is not pristine
- Fatigue crack growth in welded structures- development of models and test data for crack growth and crack trajectory stability in fail safe welded aircraft structures
- Visual inspection reliability for damaged composite aircraft- probabilities of detection
- Development of Integrated Vehicle Health Monitoring CoE for Boeing other partners.
Clients
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
- Department of Trade and Industry
- Ministry of Defence
- DSTL
- Civil Aviation Authority
- US Army
- Westland helicopters
- Agusta-Westland Helicopters
- AEA Technology
- BAE Systems
- Airbus
- International Paint
- CEC Framework 6
- Alcoa
- Sheffield University
- Milano Politecnico.
Background
Professor Phil Irving gained his BSc and PhD at Birmingham University. In the early 1970s he joined the very active fracture mechanics research group at Birmingham, performing some of the earliest measurements of fatigue crack growth thresholds in metallic materials. In 1973 he moved to the National Physical Laboratory where he developed techniques for determining stress corrosion cracking behaviour of steels in high pressure hydrogen gas environments, and continued with exploration of factors controlling fatigue cracking in high strength steels.
In 1978 he began work at GKN Technology, the research and development organisation of the GKN Automotive group, where for the first time he became involved in putting his knowledge of fatigue and fracture to practical use in design and service life prediction of a wide range of automotive components. As well as working with traditional steels, cast irons and aluminum alloys, he also played a significant role in the development of the GKN glass-epoxy leaf spring.
In 1991 he moved to Cranfield, accepting a CAA sponsored Chair in Damage Tolerance. In the time since then he has worked extensively on fatigue fracture and damage tolerance in helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. A continuing theme has been research into techniques and benefits of structural health monitoring to structural integrity of aircraft. This interest lead to his close involvement in the setting up of the Cranfield Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) Centre and his pursuit of IVHM and SHM research within the centre.
In addition to his research work he has lectured and published extensively in his research areas and has been external examiner at undergraduate, masters and PhD level on many occasions. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of IM3.
