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 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, Rolls-Royce, Wood and Airbus.

At the University of Manchester, Prof. Fonseca is EDIA lead for the department of Materials.

Prof. Fonseca is a research area lead for Modelling and AI at the Henry Royce Institute. He is also 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.

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.

We use crystal plasticity finite element modelling to understand the effects of microstructural on mechanical behaviour, predict texture and microstructure evolution during deformation and understand the factors controlling ductility and formability