Dr Nicola Symonds PhD, BEng, MRAeS, CEng
Director, Forensic Materials Engineering Consultant
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Dr Nicola Symonds is the Director of nC2 Engineering Consultancy, Business Unit within the University of Southampton. The Unit provides services direct to industrial customers, leveraging the specialist skills and equipment of the University. The Mission of nC2 Engineering Consultancy is to support the engineering of safer and more efficient products through reliable testing, scientific examiantion and expert opinion.
Failure analysis provides the answers and stops us repeating errors
Director
Nicola runs the day-to-day operations of the nC2 business unit, this is both a technical customer facing role combined with management of the staff of the unit. A typical customer could be from almost any business sector but with a surface engineering, tribology or materials issue that they cannot solve themselves. This could be a failed component, a technology they want to explore, training, testing, applied research etc. The company could be a multinational or a small innovative SME. Further information about the unit can be found at https://www.southampton.ac.uk/nc2/
Experience
Nicola gained both her degrees from the University of Southampton: B.Eng. Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, followed by a doctorate in Engineering Materials. Her thesis “Impact and wireline wear resistance of downhole coatings” was sponsored by British Petroleum and involved both impact, erosion and wear testing of polymeric coatings.
Nicola left University in 2000, and after a year as an engineer with BAe Systems made the move to the Ministry of Defence, where for ten years she investigated aircraft incidents and accidents as a Forensic Materials Engineer. She led investigations of military helicopters and fixed wing fighters and transporters, and assisted the AAIB in many civilian aircraft accidents. During this period Nicola was elected Member of the Royal Aeronautical Society and became one of the few female Chartered Engineers in this country. She also was granted a Visiting Research Fellow position here at the University of Southampton.
Prior to her current Enterprise role, Nicola was a part-time Senior Research Fellow within the National Centre for Advanced Tribology (nCATS). She led several research projects since joining the University in 2011. The first (2011-2013) involved designing and running a new high-speed impact rig to examine the high strain resistance of thin coatings, for DSTL. The first of her two current rail projects, to diagnose and predict the bearing failure of train wheelsets, was conceived by Nicola from her ongoing research under the 'Green Tribology' EPSRC grant. The second "the Adhesion Riddle" was the result of Nicola winning a grant competition to look at ways to clean the railway lines.
Through her consultancy work Nicola bceame very interested in the friction testing of metal on ice and in 2015 become a phd supervisor and is working with the British skeleton bob team.
