Dr Muhammad Khan

Areas of expertise

• Aerospace Structures
• Through-life Engineering Services

Background

Upon receiving his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from NEDUET Karachi in 2002, he joined Technology Promotion Internationals (Head Quarter: Maryland USA) for more than 3 years in the capacity of a Research Engineer. In these years, he was involved in fault diagnosis of defense applications mainly funded by General Dynamics including US Marines Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) and Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement (MTVR). In 2006, he went to The University of Manchester for his master's leading to doctoral studies and completed his PhD in 2008 with more than 12 publications in the area of fatigue of gear assemblies. Later, he joined University of Hertfordshire as a post-doctoral research associate in 2009 for two years. Where he worked on a UK MOD project related to aerospace transmission fatigue diagnosis partnered with the University of Manchester, University of Warwick and QinetiQ. He briefly taught Mechanical Engineering at Universiti Teknologi Petronas (Malaysia) as a lecturer in 2011 and the same year he then joined National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) Pakistan as an Assistant Professor. At NUST, he established a Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) center and being the Head of Postgraduate Programme started a new Master’s in the area of Computational Mechanics.

He is involved in the industrial and the academic research for the last 15 years. Current areas of interest are: Fatigue of metallic structures and machine components, Experimental evaluation of damage and prediction of useful life, Non destructive testing methodologies and Tribological phenomenon in mechanical contacts. Dr Khan is a Chartered Engineer (CEng) and Full member of Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) UK.

Current activities

1. Development of a novel  technique to correlate fatigue of mechanical structure with its modal behavior

A novel  technique is under investigation that can analyze the fatigue in mechanical structures at elevated and cyclic temperatures. Material fundamental frequency and its drop are used as the key parameters to predict the remaining useful life of metallic structures. Continuum damage mechanics and probability function are in use to consider the damage tolerances of fatigue cracks.

2. Fatigue crack characterization in thin metal plates 

Surface and sub-surface crack characterization in thin metal plates is currently under study. Guided wave ultrasonic testing is the experimental tool to investigate the orientation and the physical dimension of the crack. 

3. Airborne noise and surface wear in metal contacts

Wear in mechanical components most often generates noise within sensing and hearing limits. This project focuses to study the relation between different conditions of wear with their possible generated airborne noises. The main objective is to develop an empirical framework which can help to discuss the significance of the mentioned relationship. 

4. Damage tolerance in aerospace transmissions

A lot of experimental work has been made in this but with little theoretical support due to complex nature of operational parameters are involved. Applied continuum damage approach can be useful to predict the in-depth of the possible failures. Still a comprehensive damage model is needed. 

 5. Non destructive Testing for failure analysis

Involving Vibration, Noise and Acoustics, Ultrasonic and Oil debris analysis. 

 6. Image based material characterization

Determining the mechanical properties of the structures made of the evolving composite materials. 

 7. Couple Thermo-mechanical Problems in mechanical contacts/structures under dynamic loads

Clients

General Dynamics

QinetiQ

Petronas

HEC

Publications

• Articles in journals
• Conference papers