Emile Greenhalgh

[Full coverage of tuition fees and an annual tax-free stipend of £23,805 for Home, EU and International students.] This PhD studentship sits within EleComp , a five-year EPSRC Programme Grant spanning Imperial, Bristol and Durham, and focuses on structural power composites (SPCs) : materials that can store energy while carrying load. The project aims to help move these systems from device-scale demonstrations toward trustworthy component-level fabrication for electric aircraft, electric vehicles and satellites. The research is strongly computational and sits at the intersection of machine learning, composites manufacturing and energy storage . You will build physics-informed surrogate models and process simulations inside a Bayesian-optimisation loop that searches design and process parameters together. A key goal is to use active learning to reduce the number of costly physical builds while still gaining meaningful insight into how manufacturing routes affect performance. You will study the chain from manufacturing process to defects to performance , considering both mechanical behaviour such as stiffness and damage tolerance, and electrochemical behaviour such as capacity, impedance and cycle life. The project spans established hand lay-up routes as well as more advanced approaches including automated fibre placement (AFP) and continuous-fibre 3D printing . The work will be grounded in mechanical and electrical testing and characterisation data shared across the wider collaboration. You will begin with flat and near-flat coupons, then extend the modelling and design workflow to curved and ultimately cylindrical geometry, testing how well models trained on simpler shapes transfer to more complex ones. The project is based at Imperial College London and involves the SPC and IDEA lab teams , together with wider collaboration across the EleComp network and industrial partners. It also connects with leading academics at Chalmers and KTH , giving the student access to a broad research environment focused on next-generation electric composites. The aim is to deliver a validated, geometry-transferable design-to-manufacture pipeline for structural power composites.