JP Duarte has joined the ISP Academic Team via an EPSRC grant on Boron for Carbide in 2014.
Hi, I’m JP Duarte, the new PDRA for the Boron Carbide (B4C) project. I come from the ancient University of Coimbra, set in the sunny margins of the Mondego river in Portugal, where I taught and did research on oxide ceramics and semiconductors using a collection of spectroscopic techniques.
I will be upgrading ISP’s meso-scale launcher to a 2-stage light gas gun, enabling it to accelerate masses of a few grams to velocities in excess of 2 km/s. More challengingly, I also envisage adding a novel diagnostic capability to the ISP – an in situ time-resolved Raman spectroscopy system able to probe structural changes during dynamic loading. Both will enable the study of B4C in order to understand how Si-doping supresses the formation of weak phases upon loading on the GPa range.
By the way, JP stands for João Pedro, a name not that easy to pronounce for English natives – I’ll happily buy a pint to anyone able to say it correctly!
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Ciara Mulholland
Department of Physics
