Academic Collaboration at its Finest!

We at Rockfield are actively involved in disseminating our R&D outcome and enhancing our knowledge by participating in high-profile scientific and industrial conferences. It was through this activity we have learnt about Prof. Gennady Mishuris and his research presented on Shell Geomechanics Seminar in 2017.  He is a leader of a very successful group of applied mathematicians dealing with improvements of the numerical algorithm and working on the fundamental problems related to fluid driven fractures – this is a topic of a strong interest to Rockfield.

Through our mutual friend Prof. Stanislaw Stupkiewicz from IPPT at Polish Academy of Science we established our first contact with Prof Gennady Mishuris and his group at the Department of Mathematics at Aberystwyth University late in 2019.

Our cooperation with Prof Mishuris follows our long-standing philosophy of engaging with high-level research undertaken with numerous worldwide universities.  It was quite refreshing to engage with another Welsh University following our previous work with Universities in Cardiff and Swansea.

We started collaborating closely with Prof Mishuris in 2020 via Ser Cymru Industrial Fellowship awarded by Welsh Government to Prof. Mishuris and Dr. Dutko from Rockfield. The research undertaken through this Fellowship is directly complementing our ongoing R&D in the areas of development and application of advanced Finite/Discrete Element Method, continuum mechanics, fluid dynamics and numerical analysis where the group of Prof. Mishuris has been extensively working for the last decade. In a very short period of time, the R&D outcomes of this Fellowship were disseminated through several conference and journal papers; some of them on highly topical developments in dealing with uncertainties related to inhomogeneous toughness of geological layers which is of great importance.

Our collaboration with Prof. Mishuris does not stop there – Rockfield’s  R&D section has worked with him through recently awarded EU Horizon 2020 research project EffectFact.  The main goals of the EffectFact is to establish a new, sustainable, EU-centered network of researchers from 16 partners across different sectors and disciplines, in particular, in areas of significant interest to Rockfield such as rigorous mathematical modelling and effective numerical realisation of time dependent boundary value problems in complex discrete and continuous domains and their applications.

Under project management by Aberystwyth University, we at Rockfield have managed in a short period of time to established strong links with our collaborators at several new universities and SMEs.  This includes direct engagement with University of Venice where we have received and also sent Secondees, University of Modena Reggio Emilia, which is currently hosting a Secondee from Rockfield, collaboration with SME’s in Slovenia (C3M) and Slovakia (ROEZ).  We are also preparing for hosting several Secondees from Ukraine in 2023.