Dr Nick Collins-Craft

I am a theoretical and computational geomechanician. Specifically, I am interested in localisation behaviours in brittle materials, which typically express as cracks or shear bands. These are particularly interesting and challenging problems as the ordinary tools of continuum mechanics break down and fail to produce sensible results. By having recourse to higher order continua (such as Cosserat or second-gradient) to model shear bands, and nonsmooth analysis to model cracks, we can repair our models, and study their predictions using techniques such as linear stability analysis and the finite element method.

These mathematical challenges underlie a wide range of real world problems, running from the engineering design of piles to natural disasters such as landslides, earthquakes, rockfalls and ice sheet fractures.