Bernalite Pavan Rao

Meet our Bernalite Pavan Rao, a PhD researcher in mechanical engineering. Pavan’s area of research is in micromechanical testing of materials, more specifically metals.

Pavan Rao completed a Bachelors in mechanical engineering, in India. He furthered his studies back in 2018 in UL graduating with a Masters in mechanical engineering. He began his research journey as a research assistant in composite materials, under the guidance of Noel O’Dowd, Professor and Principal Investigator at Bernal Institute.

His niche area of research involves working on a multi scale experimental approach towards the deformation behaviour of power plant steels. In simple terms “pulling the metal apart to see what happens.” Pavan applies a deformation to the material, more specifically to the metal and examines how the crystal orientation is changing. In respect to this another component of his research involves making pillars of about 3 microns in diameter and compressing them to see what type of deformation occurs. Then using that information to calibrate their model, which can then inform Pavan and his team better in the lifetime predictability of the material.

Why is this important?

This is vital since there is an increase in renewable energy, and currently the old power plants are not operated in the way that they were designed for. They were designed for a long-term constant use but now it's used on a flexible basis. Power plants are turned on whenever needed and turned off when it's not. Due to that, the material is breaking earlier than it should. Pavan and his team are trying to understand what is happening in the material so that they can avoid future risks and increase the sustainability of the power plant.

“One of the main challenges is finding similar work and figuring out how they've performed it so that I can reproduce similar factors, including trying to understand the effect of the micro to the macro scale. That gets challenging as well because what happens here is at such a small level, but does it have a large impact? To give an estimation, 10-millimetre size when you are at the micro scale would be how large mount Everest is to you.”

When asked about Pavan’s experience in Bernal to date, he said: “I absolutely love it. If I'm having a bad day, I can just go and talk to someone or grab a coffee somewhere and just rant. Having that environment where you have those people around you is important. It's great and the discussions that I've had here with my supervisor, Postdocs, and PhDs, gives new ideas all the time and gives me an interesting perspective that I wouldn't think of initially.”

Best of luck in all your work, we are proud to call you a #Bernalite, from #BernalNeighbourhood.