Role

Nick helped develop a SHM demonstrator based around a concrete footbridge that was used to investigate accelerated aging and as a test bed for many different types of point sensors. Most recently he has developed NPL's capability in Digital Image Correlation and uniquely applied it to civil engineering structures like bridges and piers.

This technique has great potential for use in determining in-plane deformation and also for measuring crack growth and structural deterioration. Future plans are to expand the types of structures that can be analysed and to use with other measurement types so that measurements of large structures, like tunnels, can provide condition information. At the other end of the length scale techniques to allow residual stresses in the first millimetre of a materials surface are being developed.

Biography

Nick McCormick has a MA (Cantab) in Natural Sciences and joined the Materials Division at NPL in 1984. He received his PhD in 1993 from Queen Mary and Westfield College for work developing a test method for hard materials based on Edge Flaking. During his career at NPL he has worked on developing and commercialisation of test methods for hard materials, confocal microscopy for surface examination, grain sizing and simulation for hard metals, and virtual testing for composite materials. He has helped develop various websites demonstrating uses of virtual reality for materials science and material selectors. He was responsible for the deployment of the NPL Grid distributed computing system which he used to perform input sensitivity analysis of Finite Element Analysis.

More recently, he developed measurement techniques for fibre Bragg gratings and fibre-based corrosion measurement techniques.

He has been involved in many industrially focused collaborative projects and he has been a Theme leader for Physical Modelling and a Theme leader for Structural Health Monitoring.

Selected publications

• Constant-geometry edge-flaking of brittle materials
  E A Almond & N J McCormick
  Nature 321 (6065) pages 53-55 (1986)
• Edge Flaking of Hard Materials
  N J McCormick & E A Almond
  J. Hard Mat. 1 (1) pages 25-51 (1990)
• The application of confocal microscopy to the investigation of materials
  N J McCormick & M G Gee
  Proc. Micro 90, pages 393-396 (1990)
• The calibration of the nanoindenter
  N J McCormick, M G Gee & D J Hall
  Mat. Res. Soc. Symp. Proc. 308, pages 195-200 (1993)
• Confocal scanning optical microscopy [Chapter in 'Surface Characterization: A user's sourcebook']
  Ed. D. Brune, R. Hellborg et al.
  Wiley-VCH, pages 57-77 (1997)
• The use of computer simulation in the measurement of WC Grain size and shape
  B Roebuck & N J McCormick
  1998 Powder Metallurgy World Congress, Granada, Spain (1998)
• Use of the NPL Grid to Understand Uncertainties in Finite Element Models
  Nick McCormick and Keith Lawrence
  NAFEMS Benchmark Magazine (2006)
• Alternative Methods for Railway Tunnel Examination – A Review and Recommendations
  NPL Report MAT 42, February (2010)
• Digital Image Correlation for structural measurements
  Nick McCormick, Jerry Lord
  Submitted to Civil Engineering (2011)

Selected patents

• 'Parallel Confocal Microscope', GB2289345A (1995)

Other

Articles about Nick's work have appeared in New Civil Engineer, The Engineer, local TV and radio in Sussex, the BBC website, New Scientist, QMT, and other trade publications.

Contact details

E-mail: nick.mccormick@npl.co.uk
Tel: 020 8943 6377