Prof. Phil Withers, FRS, Regius Professor of Materials

Chief Scientist of the Royce Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Manchester

Natural, and increasingly manufactured materials, rely on complex hierarchical structures to provide a suite of interesting properties and functionality. Often they exploit anisotropy and heterogeneity through interfaces, chemistry and crystallography from the nanoscale to the component scale.  To date much has been learnt about materials behaviour from 2D images.  However two dimensions don’t always tell the whole story. Tomographic methods enable us to build up 3D pictures of structure. In many cases we need to be able to follow the response of these features to external loads and environments. Because it is non-destructive, X-ray computed tomography (CT) enables to acquire sequences of 3D images over time, to carry out time-lapse studies.

There are now a plethora of techniques able to characterise materials. Rather than apply them separately on different specimens, correlative tomography enables us to combine and integrate these methods to examine in detail a region of interest and to build up a multifaceted picture of how these hierarchical structures perform enabling us to identify the key length scales. We exploit multiscale correlative strategies to enable multiple chemical, structural and property datasets can be brought together at key regions of interest in three dimensions.

Through a series of examples I will look at how combining multiscale, multimodal and time lapse information can help us to investigate a very wide range of phenomena from the pupation of butterflies and the self-healing of ceramics, to corrosion and cracking in metals, to the nucleation, growth and accumulation of damage in 3D woven composites.