Dr Christos Skamniotis is a Lecturer in Engineering in the Department of Engineering at King's College London. He has worked on extremely diverse solid mechanics problems, ranging from the experimental and FE modelling of soft food deformation-fracture during oral and gastric processing, to the design of transpiration cooled gas turbine blades against creep-fatigue-ratchetting failure.

His ambition is to develop cutting-edge computational tools towards predicting and mitigating failure in applications where the harshest temperatures and loads are encountered, such as nuclear reactors, gas turbines, rocket engines and hypersonic vehicles. Of particular interest are problems where a range of techniques must be deployed to understand failure at both the engineering (millimetre) and the microstructural (nanometre) length-scales, including coupled FE heat transfer-stress analysis relied upon CFD simulations of fluid-solid interaction, theoretical thermo-elastic stress analysis, crystal plasticity FE analysis and discrete dislocation plasticity modelling.

Key aim is to strengthen the link between the Solid Mechanics, Material Science and Thermofluids disciplines to enable the safe operation of a range of Net Zero future technologies, such as hydrogen powered turbines, small modular nuclear reactors and re-usable rockets.

Christos joined King’s as a Lecturer in Engineering in January 2024, after working as a Lecturer in Engineering at the University of Leicester (2023-2024). His academic career started at Imperial College London in 2014 (Unwin prize for best PhD thesis in 2017), where he continued his research on soft biological materials at postdoctoral level for a year, followed by a 3.5 year postdoctoral research on transpiration cooled Nickel-based turbine blades at the University of Oxford. 

Research interests

• Solids under extreme heat flows
• Creep-Fatigue Failure in Nuclear, Aerospace and Rocket Engines
• Metals Under Hydrogen and Neutron Flux
• Continuum Scale and Dislocation Scale Modelling of Plastic Deformation
• Flow and Fracture Of Soft Biological Materials

More information

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