Staff profile

Bradley is a PhD student in the Department of Engineering, specialising in computational mechanics. He studied his undergraduate degree in Durham, graduating with a first class MEng degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 2020, before returning to begin his PhD in 2022. As a part of his undergraduate final year project, Bradley investigated the relative performance of implicit and explicit time stepping schemes in the Material Point Method. 

Research Project

Iceberg calving is a complex natural fracture process which is responsible for half of the mass lost from floating ice shelves and glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. There is concern that rapid changes in these ice zones could ultimately lead to rapid sea level rise over the coming years. 

The goal of Bradley's project is develop a new computational approach for the accurate and efficient simulation of crack propagation in glacier ice, using a Phase Field model with a mesh-adaptive discontininous Galerkin finite element method (DG-FEM). 

Conference Paper

• Sims, B., Bird, R., Giani, S., & Coombs, W. (2023). An investigation into the methods for modelling pre-existing cracks in phase field problems.

Journal Article

• Bird, R. E., Augarde, C. E., Coombs, W. M., Duddu, R., Giani, S., Huynh, P. T., & Sims, B. (2023). An hp-adaptive discontinuous Galerkin method for phase field fracture. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 416, Article 116336. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2023.116336
• Pretti, G., Coombs, W., Augarde, C., Sims, B., Puigvert, M., & Gutierrez, J. (2023). A conservation law consistent updated Lagrangian material point method for dynamic analysis. Journal of Computational Physics, 485, Article 112075. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2023.112075