Associate ProfessorDaniel Dias-da-Costa

With ongoing advances in the construction industry involving the introduction of new building materials and technologies, our ability to predict the structural behaviour and safety of these innovations is critical. Associate Professor Daniel Dias-da-Costa's research into advanced computational simulation techniques aims to enhance the safety of our built environment by addressing a wide range of building materials, including concrete, masonry and glass.

"My research in structural engineering and material mechanics aims to introduce a new computational framework that will have a strong impact on practice engineering. This framework will effectively bridge high-end simulation and monitoring approaches, such that structural designers can explore the full potential of challenging construction designs.

"I develop computational techniques that can be used to simulate real-life structural failure. This allows us to efficiently predict the behaviour and response of structures in such situations; for instance, when concrete starts crushing or cracking, or when reinforcing steel yields and slips against the concrete.

"This is a very complex and computationally demanding task, and even high-end commercial software often fails to deliver reliable solutions. Therefore, I have been developing new programs to address this need. This approach has already shown good performance with a wide range of problems and materials.

"I really enjoy performing experimental tests of large-scale structures, where I have the chance of pushing the materials to the limit. In this way I can deeply understand the structural response. I then bring this knowledge to my numerical models and am able to run simulations of different situations that cannot be tested otherwise. This combined approach is crucial to achieve safer design solutions.

"I am passionate about my research because it can be applied to a wide range of different areas. This gives me the opportunity to deal with people from very different backgrounds, which in fact is what I find most enriching and rewarding about my work."