Mechanical Engineering - Research

Information about current research projects related to mechanical engineering can be found in the research group home pages.

Some recent highlights relating to this engineering area can be found on our 125th anniversary website.

Several areas of specialisation exist, including:

  • The Cambridge Engineering Design Centre (EDC) undertakes research to create knowledge, understanding, methods and tools that will contribute to improving the design process. The research programme reflects UK industry's need for the best design methods and tools to achieve economic competitiveness, and to improve the quality of life through wealth creation and environmentally sustainable technology. The EDC has been named as a centre of excellence by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, having been identified as an Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (IMRC).

  • The Transportation Research Group was formed in the early 1980s to investigate the dynamics of heavy goods vehicles and their road-damaging characteristics. The group is unusual in its cross-disciplinary approach, investigating projects spanning areas from heavy vehicle dynamics, safety and suspension design, to weigh-in-motion, vehicle-road interaction, and the failure mechanisms of asphalt pavements and paving materials. The Cambridge Vehicle Dynamics Consortium has now been formed to develop research in this area.

  • The Cambridge Centre for Micromechanics was opened in March 1996, and is based at Department of Engineering. It is an inter-disciplinary research centre between the Departments of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), Engineering (Materials group), Materials Science, and Physics. The Centre brings together researchers interested in predicting the macroscopic mechanical behaviour of materials from an understanding of microstructure. This involves the application of mechanics to identifiable small-scale structures and the use of analytical and numerical methods to compute the macroscopic response.

  • The Cambridge Engineering Selector (CES), a software tool for optimal materials and process selection. CES enables the identification of the small subset of materials which will perform best in a given design, from within the full menu of materials. As there are around 60,000 and 100,000 materials available to the engineer, this software provides a valuable tool.