National Science Centre (NCN) supports fundamental research by funding research projects carried out by individual researchres and research teams, both on the domestic and international level, as well as doctoral fellowships and post-doctoral internships. NCN announces calls for proposals four times a year. The NCN grantee must be employed at a Polish host institution.
In November 2017, National Science Centre has approved and subsidized four projects from IPPT PAN:
I. OPUS 13 (research proposals submitted under this funding scheme may include the purchase or construction of research equipment)
• „Determination of factors of reactive radial artery response to hyperaemia in assessment of hypertension and coronary artery disease”Project coordinator: prof. Andrzej Nowicki
The scientific objective of the project is the introduction of the new innovative measurement system to evaluate reactive brachial and radial arteries response simultaneously, directly related to endothelial function.
• • „Dynamic structural reconfiguration for structural control: development of new control algorithms and assessment of their efficiency”Project coordinator: prof. Łukasz Jankowski
This project belongs to the field of smart structures. We intend to pursue a specific type of a smart structure capable of a dynamic self-reconfiguration. Namely, we plan toemploy the mechanisms of reconfiguration for the purpose of structural control and to: 1. develop techniques, algorithms and methodologies of structural dynamic self-reconfiguration, including their coherent theoretical and numerical description; 2. asses their effectiveness in tasks of controlling the self-stress state, geometry and frequency-domain characteristics of structures subjected to operational excitations; 3. verify the developed methods in numerical and experimental examples.
• „Deposition and characterization of novel superhard doped tungsten borides coatings”Project coordinator: Tomasz Mościcki, Ph.D., Dr Habil
This project concerns study of deposition of thin films of new super-hard materials i.e. ternary tungsten borides WxTM1-xBy where TM = Re, Ti, Zr, Mo, Cr; x=1-0 and y=2 or 4. Coatings will be deposited by pulsed laser deposition (PLD), magnetron sputtering and combination of both methods. The targets will be made by spark plasma sintering (SPS) methods. The examination of targets and deposited films together with experimental monitoring and theoretical investigation of material structure and processes occurring during deposition should lead to determination of conditions necessary for formation of reliable, super-hard coatings – the ultimate goal of the project. We propose also numerical prediction of structural and mechanical properties of these superhard metallic ternary borides. It should be noted that the SPS synthesis and the deposition of ternary borides by PLD and/or magnetron sputtering methods will be pioneering.In addition, we propose the construction of a unique research stand that will allow the use of both laser and magnetron or two magnetrons simultaneously.
II. PRELUDIUM 13 (pre-doctoral grants)
• • „ Micromechanical model of damage evolution in composite materials with arbitrary shape of inclusions”Project coordinator: Michał Majewski
The scientific objective of the project is to formulate and implement an analytical micromechanical model that takes into account the evolution of damage in predicting the macroscopic response of a composite material. The developed micromechanical model will account for the influence of the morphology on the behavior of non-homogeneous material. In particular, the degree of packing of inclusions, their size and shape, the volume fraction of the phases, their constitutive equations and quality of adhesion between them will be taken into account when estimating the effective thermomechanical properties of the composite in which damage development is observed. Verification of the results will be done through the numerical homogenization and with reference to experimental data. Two research hypotheses are put forward in the project: a. The influence of shape of the inclusions in the mean-field micromechanical models can be taken into account by numerical concentration tensors obtained by the semi-analytical method of numerical homogenization. b. Predictions of a non-linear response of a heterogeneous material related to damage evolution can be improved in comparison to conventional micromechanical models by adopting the Morphology-based Representative Pattern approach (MRP).