Staff profile

Nathan is a PhD student in the Department of Engineering having completed a MEng degree in Mechanical Engineering at Durham in 2019. Nathan's project focuses on using the Material Point Method to model biomechanical structures from MRI scan data, namely the human heart.

Research Project

The ability to model biomechanical structures is an impoertant task in investigating the way the human body works, giving scientists a greater understanding of how human tissues are affected by various factors. The Material Point Method (MPM) is a semi-meshless method which discretises a domain into particles which deform to define the response of the material. The MPM has not been used previously to model heart tissue but can better handle large deformation problems compared to standard modelling techniques. By performing an inverse analysis, a greater understanding of the changes in material properties of the heart with factors such as age or disease can be seen.

Conference Paper

• Gavin, N., Coombs, W., Brigham, J., & Augarde, C. (2022, April). MRI to MPM: Developing a Patient-specific Material Point Method Model of the Human Heart. Paper presented at UKACM 2022, Nottingham, UK
• Gavin, N., Bird, R. E., Coombs, W. M., & Augarde, C. E. (2023, June). An open-source Julia code for geotechnical MPM. Presented at 10th European Conference on Numerical Methods in Geotechnical Engineering, London
• Gavin, N., Coombs, W., Brigham, J., & Augarde, C. (2023, April). On the development of a material point method compatible arc length solver for large deformation solid mechanics. Presented at UKACM 2023, Coventry, UK

Journal Article

• Gavin, N., Pretti, G., Coombs, W., Brigham, J., & Augarde, C. (2024). On the implementation of a material point‐based arc‐length method. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 125(9), Article e7438. https://doi.org/10.1002/nme.7438