Darren Hughes

Darren Hughes is an Associate Professor in Materials and Manufacturing at WMG. He is currently engaged in a number of multi-material projects together with industrial partners including Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Steel. He is Co-I on several current TSB-funded projects. Recently, he was part of an ERDF-funded project to exploit thermoplastic composites in automotive structures and specifically developed a route for joining them with minimal modification to existing manufacturing processes. Prior to starting at WMG in 2010 he was responsible for engineering instruments at the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France, having been seconded there from the University of Salford in 2002 to create a new materials science laboratory. He is a world-leading expert in the evaluation of materials by non-destructive techniques (NDT) and in particular has nearly 20 years of experience in characterisation using X-rays and neutrons.

Dr Hughes currently supervises 9 PhD students, is module leader for Design for Manufacture on the university undergraduate degree, leads professional programmes in automotive body joining and has a variety of on-going research projects including for example joining optimisation, lightweight structures and nano-composites. In addition to being a member of national/international panels, he has authored over 50 publications including 20 peer-reviewed outputs since 2008. He was a member of the panel which delivered the first international standard for the non-destructive evaluation of residual stress using neutrons (ISO/TS 21432:2005).