Talk: How much cement can we do without?
A short talk as a "new academic" at the CSCT Winter Showcase 2020, covering my research on reducing cement demand and its carbon implications.
Rick Lupton
Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, University of Bath
I’m a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bath. My group’s research aims to understand how materials, products and systems drive environmental impacts, and how to understand and reduce the uncertainty that is inevitable in doing this type of analysis — through developing and applying Industrial Ecology modelling methods such as Material Flow Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment, and creating open-source tools for data visualisation and modelling. Recent projects have studied key materials including steel, cement, timber, chemicals and plastics, as well as applications in the transport and buildings sectors.
I joined the University of Bath in 2019, having previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, completed my PhD on frequency-domain modelling of floating offshore wind turbines, and worked as a wind turbine design consultant.
Drawing on my background in dynamic modelling and analysis, I’m particularly interested in ways we can quantify and understand uncertainty in systems, data and scenarios, such as applications of Bayesian inference, and improvements in uncertainty and sensitivity analysis methods in Industrial Ecology — and how this information can help designers, policymakers and others to make better decisions.
Recent posts
Wind turbine aerodynamic loads in Python with "bemused"
The aerodynamic loads on a wind turbine rotor are often calculated using Blade Element–Momentum theory (BEM). As part of my PhD thesis I implemented the BEM calculations in Python, and I've now tidied this up as an open-source Python package `bemused` that I'll introduce here.