Jon Hughes is a Senior Scientist in the Advanced Engineering Materials team at NPL and currently leads the Structural Health Monitoring team. He has worked in the field of materials testing for 15 years and specialised in the testing of composites. From 2016 to 2018, Jon worked at Red Bull Racing and developed and tested carbon fibre composites for the Formula 1 team. Jon returned to NPL in 2018 where he has helped take typical non-contact materials test techniques such as Digital Image Correlation out of the laboratory and into the field, where it is used to examine large structures such as railway tunnels, bridges and nuclear infrastructure.
Areas of interest
Jon has designed and built many bespoke machines for structural health monitoring. These include Network Rail’s DIFCAM railway tunnel examination trolley and Sellafield’s High Accuracy Inspection System for long-term monitoring of nuclear waste storage. Jon’s science area includes processing of image data with feature recognition to highlight common structural defects and uses Digital Image Correlation to track changes over time. Jon is currently developing techniques to combine image data with sub-surface techniques such as ground penetrating radar. This capability enables common structural faults to be detected using the image data and potential causes to be highlighted using the sub-surface data.
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