Awarded the EDF/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in Correlative Microscopy for Nuclear Power

I am very grateful to both EDF and the Royal Academy of Engineering for granting me a five year fellowship to allow me to spend more time on our microscopes understanding how materials change inside nuclear reactors - there is a lot of really exciting work ahead of us!

The five-year position, co-sponsored by industry partner EDF Energy, will enable me to expand my research group supporting the latest developments in materials geared towards advancing the past, present, and future of nuclear power.

It’s a real honour to be awarded this fellowship, which will be instrumental in meeting the pressing challenges posed by climate change and energy security. The UK is committed to achieving net zero by 2050, which means it must remove as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as it emits. Renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, are a vital part of this transition but present fluctuations in supply are resulting in reliance on natural gas.

Nuclear power, which produces around the same amount of carbon as solar and wind, currently accounts for between 15% and 20% of our energy. But the existing fleet of gas-cooled nuclear reactors are coming to the end of their operational life and will all close in the coming years. For new reactor construction and exciting advanced fission and fusion designs, materials research is essential, and it’s great to be at the forefront of such important work.

I am Deputy Director of the Interface Analysis Centre (IAC) facility at the University of Bristol. The IAC facility contains a suite of advanced microscopes used by my research team to understand how components in nuclear reactors change over time. This includes a plasma-focused ion beam providing 3D analysis of how the structures in a material change at the nano and micro scale, which can predict where a component might fail. 

The materials in a nuclear reactor experience one of the most extreme environments on Earth. Gradually, over years, these components change as they are exposed to high temperatures, stresses, radiation, and corrosive environments in the reactor. We have worked in partnership with EDF for a long time to help understand how the materials in the reactor evolve during operation. Our research has helped extend the life of the gas-cooled reactor fleet by more than a decade, resulting in billions of pounds of clean electricity on the UK grid. This fellowship will allow us to grow our collaboration with EDF, providing material insights to extend the life of existing reactors safely, support the construction of new reactors, and better understand future challenges.

Awarded the Amazon Physical Science Fellowship!

I’m delighted to say that I am one of three early-career academics awarded the 2022 Amazon Physical Science Fellowship.

This was a really interesting fellowship opportunity giving applicants the opportunity to present a portfolio of scientific ideas and discoveries over the past twenty years that we believe will have dramatic and positive impact on the world.

I very much enjoyed the process of creating a portfolio of scientific ideas, dipping into areas of physics and science outside my normal area and learning lots more about the exciting science going on around the world. I hope that the efforts of the applicants will be of great benefit to the programme, and want to thank Amazon for this amazing award.

Awarded the IOM3 Cook/Ablett award!

So while I begin to setup my life here in Bristol, creating lecture courses, setting up research projects and catching up with old friends, I received some unexpected but pleasant news.

A paper I published a year or so ago has won an award from IOM3, the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. The award is the 2017 Cook/Ablett award for publication of particular merit in the field of metals, which is a long but gratifying name!

The paper in question is one I wrote on the use of atom probe tomography to analyse the chemistry of interfaces between phases in metal alloys for aircraft. Atom probe tomography, the technique I specialised in at the University of Oxford, allows us to look at how the chemistry of a material changes on the atomic scale, and for applications like aircraft engines, even the slightest change in the amount of a particular element at the boundary of two phases can dramatically change how it responds under stress and at high temperatures.

A figure from the paper - the red surface is a Laves phase particle (mostly tungsten and molybdenum) in a maraging steel, and the green surfaces are smaller nickel-aluminium rich beta-phase particles. In this case, the Laves phase has grown bigger as the beta particles have precipitated, meaning that the interface between the Laves and matrix is complicated with different concentration profiles from the two positions marked by arrows.

It's always gratifying to get recognition for the work we do as scientists - and this is a paper where we really went in-depth on the nitty-gritty of analysing atom probe data, so the publicity it got will hopefully get people thinking about how they do their analysis. My thanks go to my co-authors, in particular Baptiste Gault (now at MPIE), who did a lot of the awesome simulation work. 

A much belated update - with many changes!

It's been over a year since I last updated this blog. 2016 was a difficult year both around the world and personally, which I won't get into here. But 2017 has started with much positivity and change.

In January 2017 I started a new position, returning to Bristol, the city and university where I lived for 9 years and studied for both my MSc and PhD. I am now teaching in the department of Physics where I did my undergraduate degree, which is a wonderful and strange experience. 

Since starting, I went straight into lecturing (My first lecture was three days before my start date!), teaching a masters course on the Nuclear Fuel Cycle, which involved lots of interesting discussions of materials science, radiation damage and the way fuel is made and disposed of in nuclear fission and fusion reactors. It was also very interesting to use my experience in the renewable energy industry to talk about climate change and energy policy, which is something I will be expanding on next year's course - the choices of how we power the electricity of networks of the future is a fascinating and vital debate.

I will also be designing a new Introduction to Materials Science course for the Physics undergraduate course, which will be great fun, especially designing some practicals to do in my classes! I really enjoy teaching, and it's a real pleasure to do more of it in my new role.

I'm also still doing research, and will be returning every now and then to Oxford to do some experiments with atom probe tomography, which is a technique I find both fascinating and enjoyable. I'll also be adding in new techniques to solve materials science challenges, including high speed AFM developed at Bristol, X-ray diffraction and tomography, NanoESCA and electron microscopy. 

I have continued to publish lots of scientific papers and even won an award recently - the Cook/Ablett award for publication of merit in the field of metals, from the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3), which was a great honour. 

I hope to be a bit better about keeping this blog up to date. I'm still writing fiction, and the Maelstrom's Edge project is still going strong, with lots of exciting new models coming in the future. To a positive future!

Making miniatures - converting the models from the Maelstrom's Edge boxset!

After working on Maelstrom's Edge for about 4 and a quarter years, designing the fluff and writing hundreds of thousands of words of stories set in our new universe, it was amazing to finally get the box set in the post and see the models we'd spent so long creating. I'd had a few of them earlier, but most of these were as new to me as to our backers! 

As well as a writer I've always been a gamer and hobbyist. I have a big space wolf/space marine army, as well as tau and IG in various states of assembly. Making stories and customising the models to fit that were always the most enjoyable thing for me - I spent a lot of time kitbashing Necromunda gangers out of pretty much every different sprue I could find. My sculpting and painting isn't as good, but I have a lot of fun creating custom poses from multipart plastics. 

So, with all of the sprues in hand, I set out to see what I could make from my Epirian and Karist sprues. My photography isn't the best, but hopefully people get the idea! 

First up, the Epirian robots. I'd had a play with the Contractor sprue before, but this was my first opportunity to play around with the Hunter, Scarecrow and Drone sprues, which are so much fun to kitbash. First off, a Hunter, armed with Maglock Chaingun, Supressor Dual Machine Gun and Strike Missiles. I put the Chaingun on the other arm to get an aiming pose, and used green stuff to fill in the gaps between the arms and shoulders to enable a wider stance. The Strike missiles are easy to pose if you slice the bottom mount off and then rotate the missile itself. 

The Scarecrow is even more customisable. I made some steps from plasticard so that the multi-jointed legs could climb up it, and cut off the elbow joint from the Clingfire Sprayer so that I could put the Railrifle on the left arm. I'm quite happy with how easy it was to make such a dynamic pose suited to the Scarecrow's behaviour as a lone bot patrolling, taking out intruders from a distance. 

This is my first Spider drone. The main ability of the four-legged ground drone is the way they hug the terrain, their bot protocols giving them a choice of three different bonuses based on utliising the cover of the buildings and rubble around them. I wanted to bring this across in my squad, so I've tried to create a pose where the spider is crawling up a piece of building (made from heavy plasticard with a bunch of bits from the terrain sprue), keeping its profile low to avoid enemy fire. There's not actually any conversion done to the spider other than twisting and bending each leg so that the foot is flat on whichever surface it touches - I did this after I'd made the terrain. 

Lastly there's my first attempt at a Mature Angel. These are just as much fun to model as they are to write about. Apart from the core of their torso, most of the alien body of the Angel is made up of morphing flowing void gel, which means they can adapt their limbs to suit the situation, creating claws, legs, tentacles or limbs as suits them. This was a relatively simple hack to display that, twisting the clawed forelimbs and then using the two additional claws plus some green stuff to give them two additional legs, giving them a nice crab-like feel. 

I'm using a bone-coloured scheme for my Karists - the Tempest above being the first I finished, which I think should complement the deep purples and blacks of the Angels really nicely. I'm not sure about the metallic gun, I feel that could be made more interesting, suggestions welcome! 

More to come in future as I explore the possibilities of the other sprues and start painting in earnest, but just wanted to show what is sitting on my desk inbetween writing sessions!

Maelstrom's Edge: Battle For Zycanthus arrives!

It's finally here! Approximately four years and four months since I was first approached to work on the project, the launch box set of Maelstrom's Edge is in the wild and has arrived in the hands of our Kickstarter backers. It's also the first time I've had a look at the whole thing myself.

The Maelstrom's Edge: Battle For Zycanthus box set, together with my two co-written tie-in novels.

It's a satisfyingly heavy box, packed full of sprues - exactly how you want a new game to arrive! The box art is beautiful, too, and I've not noticed any typos in the back cover text I wrote, which is good!

A very full interior...

Inside the box is a veritable horde of plastics, tokens and cards. I've seen some of the infantry models before during our tests, but this was the first time I have had the opportunity to build the robots and Angels, and the first time I've ever seen the Handler, Kaddar Nova and Shadow Walker models in the flesh. The plastic is so crisp and the details are great, and the multipart models are great fun for converting - I've started building my Epirians and will post some pictures in a few weeks time. 

There's also the cards - unit cards for points costs and army building (that let us tweak the stats if we need to without reprinting the rulebook), mission cards for easy selection of which game to play, and an entire extra game using cards to represent fleets of ships battling for resources on worlds threatened by the Maelstrom. I'm looking forward to playing that in particular. 

The Maelstrom's Edge A5 rulebook details all the game rules, the army building for the first two factions, as well as lots of rich background to the Maelstrom's Edge universe

The biggest thrill for me, aside from the models themselves, is the 144 page full colour A5 Rulebook. Jon 'yakface' Regul has created an amazing ruleset full of dynamic action and careful battlefield tactics, and the diagrams and pictures in the book really do justice to it. There's also details on how to build armies for the first two factions - the corporate robots of the Epirian Foundation and the religious fanatics of the Karist Enclave.

I'm really proud of the fluff section, which I wrote a large part of. As well as delving further into the background of the Epirian and Karist factions, we also talk a lot more about the broader Maelstrom's Edge universe, including further details on future factions, which I'm very excited to start working on, like the exosuited House Champions of the Remnant Fleet, the ragtag rebels and revolutionaries of the Broken and the bizarre posthumans of the Kaigus Pact, changed after thousands of years living in the microgravity of space. These are the three factions we want to expand into next, and each should porvide a very different experience on the tabletop and in the fiction. There's also teasers for where we might go even further into the future, with hints at factions further from the Edge like the aquatic Tragunite Host and the the AI hunters of the Comm Guild. 

We've put so much effort into designing a universe and game to match the dreams we always had for a tabletop wargame. It's so amazing to finally see it in the flesh, and to start getting positiv feedback from our backers. I look forward to exploring more of the universe and creating more great content in the future!

Maelstrom's Edge shipping soon!

So after 4 and a half years of work, and many hundreds of thousands of words, Maelstrom's Edge is making its final steps into the public domain this month. Our Kickstarter backers will be getting their copies soon, as we ship the first collection of box sets into the wider world. 

Over on the Maelstrom's Edge website, the store is starting to come together, and those that didn't back on the Kickstarter can order copies of the boxed game, as well as hard copies of the two novels that Stephen Gaskell and I cowrote for the project, Maelstrom's Edge: Faith and Maelstrom's Edge: Sacrifice. For those that prefer ebook format, it's of course still available on Amazon Kindle. 

It's been a lot of work to get it to this point - we've spent the time since the Kickstarter refining the rule and fluff content for the 144 page rulebook, as well as all the associated content - the back of the box, the flyers, etc. Everything is more or less back from the manufacturers, so the boxes will be assembled and sent out to our first backers.

I'm really proud of the work we've done to create the first two factions, the rules, the background and the miniatures, not to mention all the fiction we've written (there's some great short fiction still to come!)

I'm also very keen to start exploring the next phases of the project - the fluff section of the rulebook hints at the future factions we want to explore. I'm a big fan of all of them, whether it's the gladiatorial spec-oc teams of the Remnant Fleet, the rag-tag warbands of the Broken or the high-tech of the Comm Guild's Darkener operatives hunting down rogue AI. But the ones I'm particularly excited about expanding into miniatures are the two alien races - the many-bodied creatures of the Tragunite Host, who can reassemble their coral-like component organisms into different larger forms, and the freaky bio-enhanced posthumans of the Kaigus Pact, gangly creatures that have evolved from humanity's first forays into space, twisted after millennia living in low gravity. 

We have loads of plans for future miniatures, rules and fiction, and hopefully when people see the quality of our first release they will be excited too! The more successful our initial box set, the easier and quicker we can move onto the new factions, as well as fleshing out the armies of the Epirian Foundation and Karist Enclave. So we hope that our loyal Kickstarter backers enjoy their first taste of Maelstrom's Edge in the Battle for Zycanthus box set, and please spread the word if you do - the more players we have, the faster we can explore the wider universe we've created!

The Maelstrom's Edge Kickstarter is finished!

It's been a long and bumpy rollercoaster ride for all the people at Spiral Arm Studios who've been working on the Maelstrom's Edge project over the course of our 41-day Kickstarter, but we finished with an amazing 813 backers for a combined total of $70,105 raised!

We added loads of content to the $90 sweet spot pledge over the last few weeks, and hit several of the stretch goals we really wanted to hit - getting the funding to record 4 more audiobooks (likely to be 2 by Stephen Gaskell and 2 by me) at $55k, and getting through $60k is really great as it means the larger models like the Hunter and Angel get their own custom-made bases, which is really important to me as a modeller as I can convert more great poses.

And literally 1 minute before the end we got to the $70k stretch goal where all backers get free digital copies of my first novel (co-written with Stephen), Maelstrom's Edge: Faith. It would be really exciting to have more people reading it!

Writing for Maelstrom's Edge has been a blast and the money we've raised ensures we have the best possible launch product we can, and also helps us begin planning for the design of future content - new units, new factions and new novels - exciting times!

Some Maelstrom's Edge short stories!

We're halfway through the Maelstrom's Edge Kickstarter and things are going well - nearly twice our initial target already! We're hoping that over the next three weeks we can raise a bit more to reach some stretch goals and add better value to the boxset - the free terrain sprue at £45k and the new base sprue for the Hunter and Spider robots at £60k would be awesome. Every bit we raise is going back into the project to invest in the next set of models, not just for the Epirians and Karists but also for the three more factions in development. 

As part of the Kickstarter updates, we've been releasing short stories set in the Maelstrom's Edge universe, by me and my fellow Lead Writer Stephen Gaskell. As well as an audiobook of Stephen's story 'Transit', there have been three of my short story released so far. 

In the most recent update, we see how the Scarecrow  patrol bot for the Epirian Foundation defends its territory from intruders. When a naive young Karist priest decides a rural farm is an ideal location to steal resources, he doesn't plan for the Scarecrow keeping watch over the buildings. This is one of the first stories we wrote when designing the universe, and it's a nice short intro to our new unit. The Scarecrow is amazingly poseable with every limb having complete freedom and I'm very excited to get my hands on the sprue! 

A few days ago we shared another story showcasing an Epirian robot, in this case the heavier-duty Hunter warmech. Hunters are specifically designed for combat, unlike the smaller robots in the box set, which are adapted for battle from civilian designs (the Scarecrow was originally a crop duster, for example). This short story was written during the Kickstarter itself, and takes place during events of the second novel, Maelstrom's Edge: Sacrifice, where the Karist Enclave has launched a full-scale offensive on the city of Pike's Basin. A Epirian Handler has left his bots on patrol whilst he sneaks off to be with his girl, and is left to rely on two Hunters to save the train depot he's supposed to be protecting. Canny readers will spot that this story explains why the characters in the novels later use the trains to get where they need to go!

The Shipyard was another early story I wrote at the beginning of the project, showcasing the way an Epirian Handler interacts with her bots, as well as teasing a few details of the Broken, one of our future factions. Like the Scarecrow, The Shipyard is set after the events of the novels, when conflict between the factions has erupted into the open. We're looking forward to exploring this timeline more as things progress.

There'll be more stories to come over the course of the Maelstrom's Edge Kickstarter! Hope you enjoy reading them!

The Maelstrom's Edge Kickstarter is live!

So after three and half years hard work in our spare time, the Maelstrom's Edge project has finally seen the light of day on Kickstarter - see the video below to see what we've been working on!

Maelstrom's Edge is something I'm very proud of - not just the two novels but also the background, models and game - Jon Regul has done a tremendous job writing a really clean and concise skirmish ruleset which is a lot of fun to play, and the multipart plastics are a job to build, convert and paint. Everything is very close to finished so the time to delivery after the Kickstarter finishes should be much quicker than for many projects - we hope to deliver before the end of the year. 

Now the long road of development is nearly over and all that's left to do is watch what happens - it's both exciting and extremely nervewracking!