Dr Luiz Bortolan Neto, a structural materials engineer at ANSTO has received an Industry Partnership award for his significant contribution to defence science at the DMTC annual conference in Canberra, last week.
The award is given to an individual researcher who has contributed significantly to the industrial capability being developed in a DMTC project.
Dr Bortolan Neto has worked for seven years in successive projects related to modelling the response of material to blast events and life-of-type assessments for naval shipbuilding steels.
The assessments involved developing and enhancing complex algorithms that are used to study and predict deformation and component failure.
“Luiz was nominated by peers in his own project team, including Defence scientists, and they stressed his high level of integrity and commitment to collaboration with partners,” DMTC Maritime Program Leader Stephen van Duin said.
“Luiz’s expert contributions over seven years have been vital to the project’s success and enabling Defence to better predict impact effects of blasts and understand the ‘life-of-type’ of naval shipbuilding steels.
“He is highly valued for his extensive knowledge of numerical and machine learning and for his role in creating novel methods for predicting blast pressure-time history of enclosed explosions.”
Prof Mihail Ionescu, Leader of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle research group, said Luiz is a highly focused and productive modeller who is using advanced computational and mathematical methods to solve complex problems in materials science.
“I have been working with DMTC to simplify the approach to blast modelling focusing on key parameters to make the calculations quicker and less computationally intensive,” said Dr Bortolan Neto, who has been undertaking research at ANSTO since 2016.
He joined the ANSTO Nuclear Fuel Cycle group in April 2016 as a structural materials engineer. His research centres on the application of computational and mathematical methods to solve complex materials science problems.
A number of perpetual Awards for Excellence are presented at DMTC’s Annual Conference. The Conference provides a key opportunity to celebrate successes and share information about the cutting-edge technological advances being pursued across the DMTC community.