Research Group(s)

• Engineering and Process Metallurgy
• Materials Performance Centre

Research Institutes

• Dalton Nuclear Institute
• LATEST2
• Materials Performance Centre
• Metallic Materials

Professor João Quinta da Fonseca completed his PhD on the mechanical behaviour of high volume fraction MMCs at the University of Leeds, before moving to the University of Manchester, where he is currently Professor of Mechanical Metallurgy.

He is the director of LightForm,  a 5 year multidisciplinary project with core support from the The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) programme grant scheme, led by The University of Manchester with partners at University of Cambridge and Imperial College, London.

He is a member of the Metallurgy and Corrosion research group and a member of the Centre for Light Alloy Research and Innovation (CLARI). Much of this research work is funded by industrial collaborators from the aerospace, energy and automotive sectors. Current industrial collaborators include Novelis, Constelium, Otto Fuchs, EdF, Rolls-Royce, Wood and Airbus.

At the University of Manchester, Prof. Fonseca is also Academic Line Manager in the Department of Materials and a member of the departmental EDI committee.

Prof. Fonseca chairs the IOM³ committee of advanced metal forming and is a member of the International scientific committee of ICOTOM, the international texture of materials conference.

My main research interest is the mechanics of metal deformation at the microstructural scale and how it relates to microstructure evolution during processing and material performance in service. This research ranges over topics such experimental mechanics, crystal plasticity, crystallographic texture, recrystallisation and phase transformations.

Our group has pioneered the application of high (spatial) resolution digital image correlation (HRDIC) to measure deformation with sub-micron resolution and has applied it to study different metals and alloys. Some of our recent papers on HRDIC are:

- Slip activity during low-stress cold creep deformation in a near-α titanium alloy, Acta Materialia, 229 (2022), 117691

- Quantification of strain localisation in a bimodal two-phase titanium alloy, Scripta Materialia. 145 (2018) 45–49.
- How magnesium accommodates local deformation incompatibility: a high-resolution digital image correlation study, Acta Materialia. 133 (2017) 367–379.
- Effect of nanoscale α 2 precipitation on strain localisation in a two-phase Ti-alloy, Acta Materialia. 129 (2017) 72–82.

We are keen users of synchrotron and neutron diffraction beamlines to study the deformation and microstruture evolution of alloys in-situ and use the data to develop computational models of metal deformation. For examples see the papers below:

-  The effect of loading direction and Sn alloying on the deformation modes of Zr: An in-situ neutron diffraction study, Materials Science and Engineering: A. 650 (2016) 497–509.
-  Deformation path effects on the internal stress development in cold worked austenitic steel deformed in tension, Materials Science and Engineering: A. 614 (2014) 326–337.
-  Texture memory and variant selection during phase transformation of a zirconium alloy, Acta Materialia. 57 (2009) 5501–5511.
-  Capturing the texture changes in a zirconium alloy during the allotropic phase transformation, Scripta Materialia. 61 (2009) 399–402.

We use crystal plasticity finite element modelling to understand the effects of microstructural on mechanical behaviour, predict texture and microstructure evolution evolution during deformation and understand the factors controlling ductility and formability. For examples of our crystal plasticity modelling work see the following papers:

-  On the ductility of alpha titanium: The effect of temperature and deformation mode, Acta Materialia. 149 (2018) 1–10.
-  Discontinuous yielding in wrought magnesium, Computational Materials Science. 132 (2017) 81–91
-  Modeling Twin Clustering and Strain Localization in Hexagonal Close-Packed Metals, Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A. (2014) 1–8
-  Modelling the effect of elastic and plastic anisotropies on stresses at grain boundaries, International Journal of Plasticity. (2014).