Dr Sandra Korte

Post-Doctoral Research Associate

Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy

PH: 44 (0) 1223334339
Email: [email protected]
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Background

Sandra Korte is a post-doctoral research associate in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge. After completing a first degree in Mechanical Engineering (Dipl.-Ing.) at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, she moved to New Zealand to study for a Masters in Engineering at the University of Canterbury. She earned her PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she is now also a Research Fellow at Magdalene College.

Sandra Korte’s research aims to understand the underlying mechanisms by which permanent deformation occurs in complex crystal structures and how it might be controlled and manipulated. She uses micromechanical testing, in particular nanoindentation and microcompression, to suppress cracking in these mostly brittle materials. Having extended the microcompression technique to allow experiments up to several hundred degrees, this now allows the determination of characteristic material properties such as the change in yield stress with temperature or the activation volume. Due to the possibility of purposefully suppressing cracking, combination with electron microscopy furthermore allows the study of operative slip systems or the formation of cracks, depending on the material and sample size chosen.