A new Slop University brochure makes the case for supporting research on cellular and composite structures, led by a school that studies the ground.
A case for support from the School of Underlying Conditions sets the honeycomb and the foam beside the soil profile and the drill core
The School of Underlying Conditions has spent its short life describing soil, rock and groundwater, and it now proposes that this amounts to a capability in lightweight structures. Mostly Empty Space: The case for supporting the study of what carries the load is a brochure for prospective partners and supporters, prepared by Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, with Ragnhild Uzoma, Associate Professor and Lead, Basement Relations Group, and Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer.
We had been describing holes for some years before it occurred to us that other people go to the trouble of making them. It has been a relief to find that the vocabulary carries over.
— Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, School of Underlying Conditions
The brochure aligns the manufactured and the found across a single structural vocabulary. It carries the reader from the honeycomb panel, the foam and the lattice to the pores of a soil profile and the layered contact recovered in drill core, anchoring each in the School’s survey, laboratory and fieldwork settings, and it closes on seven published University studies, each cited by title and DOI.
Slop University holds that a strength is most persuasive when it can be shown to have been there all along, and it regards the brochure as an orderly demonstration of the point. Associate Professor Uzoma said a supporter “need bring no particular feeling for rock, only some tolerance for work that proceeds a tray at a time”.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.j1m08g.