Slip is believed to by the major cause of solid degradation, wear and eventual breakdown, so obviously is something to avoid!

These types of contacts occur widely in large industrial machinery, from turbine engines to heads in oil well risers. Sometimes these are had to access, so understanding how and why degradation occurs is of vital importance in condition monitoring and/or predictive maintenance!

My interest in the area is twofold. 

• Firstly, I am interested in what is known as half-plane theory, which exploits the fact that in large machines, we can often approximate the solid shapes by large half-planes in a linear elastic regime. 

• Secondly, given that in many industrial settings the geometry of the machine is quite complex, we often seek approximate or asymptotic solutions to the problem. This typically involves concentrating at the edge of the contact region as this is invariably where the effects of slip first arise. 

Both of these strands are in collaboration with Prof. David Hills' group in the Department of Engineering at the University of Oxford. You can see my recent work on the Publications page.