Rolls Royce
University of Oxford

Christopher is researching how fatigue occurs within jet engines and 3D printed parts, with the overall aim of making aerospace travel safer and life cycle predictions more reliable. Most engineering failures occur as a result of damage accumulated from repeated applied stress: fatigue. This limits the lifetime of components, resulting in either in-service failure, or inefficient design to accommodate high safety margins. Laboratory testing of fatigue is often limited to millions of cycles, meaning that manufacturers must extrapolate predictions for aircraft components experiencing billions of cycles.

Christopher will study the fatigue of these materials in the billions of cycles and observe the behaviour of micron scale features with ultrasonic fatigue testing. Christopher will work with the European Space Agency and Rolls-Royce in order to pinpoint sources of failures in 3D printed parts, as well as from other advanced manufacturing methods such as linear friction welding, potentially providing a basis to predict fatigue related failures in the future. His research could then also be applied to space travel and military research.

Christopher has an international background. Raised in Switzerland and France, with Italian and German nationality, he completed the International Baccalaureate in Geneva before studying Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Christopher worked at the European Space Agency prior to joining the University of Oxford to begin a DPhil with Rolls Royce.

Christopher applied for the Industrial Fellowship because he wanted his research to have a direct impact on the aerospace industry.