Stress Analyst - Mechanical & Thermal Integrity in Oxford

We are looking for a Stress Analyst – Mechanical & Thermal Integrity to join Coolbrook’s Technology and Engineering team. As a Stress Analyst, you will prove that blades, discs, and casings survive high speed, high temperature, and decades of continuous industrial duty. You own the structural integrity case for RDH and RDR critical parts. You show, by analysis and test, that each part meets its strength, life, and vibration requirements for long continuous operation, with clearly stated margins. Assess non-conformances, supplier deviations, and concessions quickly and soundly, so that hardware keeps running.

You receive geometry from design, metal temperatures and thermal transients from the thermal analysts, aerodynamic pressures and forcing from aero, speeds and modes from rotor dynamics, and material data from materials engineering or data from commissioning and field service. You deliver stresses, lives, margins, design recommendations, and integrity reports.

As Stress Analyst, your responsibilities would include:

• Static and thermo-mechanical FEA: blades, vanes, discs, shafts, casings and flanges under centrifugal, pressure and thermal loads.
• Lifing: low-cycle fatigue (strain-life, Neuber), high-cycle fatigue (Goodman / Haigh), creep and creep-fatigue interaction, and thermo-mechanical fatigue.
• Fracture mechanics and damage tolerance: LEFM and crack-growth assessment, critical defect sizes, and the resulting NDT acceptance criteria.
• Overspeed and burst: disc burst and overspeed margins, spin-test requirements, and blade containment checks for the casing.
• Blade and disc dynamics: modal analysis, Campbell and interference (SAFE) diagrams, forced response and mistuning sensitivity, and frequency margins.
• Pressure parts and joints: design-by-analysis of pressure-containing casings (EN 13445 / ASME VIII Div. 2), bolted-joint assessment (VDI 2230), and buckling checks.
• Validation: specify strain gauging, blade tip timing and spin-pit tests, and correlate the models with the results.
• Reports and reviews: write integrity substantiation reports and provide input to design reviews and the CE / PED conformity files.

For success in this role, you will need:

• MSc or PhD in mechanical, aerospace or materials engineering, or a BSc with strong relevant experience.
• Expert use of an FE package (ANSYS, Abaqus or NX Simcenter), including non-linear contact and sub-modeling, backed by classical hand calculations.
• Sound knowledge of fatigue, creep and fracture mechanics, and of how high-temperature alloys behave (nickel-base superalloys, heat-resistant steels).
• Clear technical writing, and the judgement to say when a margin is not good enough.

Desirable would be:

• Fatigue post-processing tools (such as nCode) and scripting (APDL, Python) for automated lifing.
• Probabilistic lifing, or experience applying aerospace critical-part methods to industrial duty.
• Hands-on experience with strain-gauge, tip-timing, or spin-pit campaigns.

Experience levels:

• For the engineer level: 3–5 years of FEA and lifing on rotating hardware, or a PhD in fatigue or fracture.
• For the advanced level: 6+ years of stress and lifing on gas or steam turbines, aero engines or other critical rotating parts.
• For the senior level: 12+ years. You are the technical authority who sets lifing methods and design rules and signs off critical-part substantiation.

At Coolbrook we are passionate about building teams where unique perspectives and backgrounds are valued and where everyone feels equally included. If this resonates with you, we are looking forward to receiving your application.

About Coolbrook: Coolbrook is a transformational technology and engineering company on a mission to decarbonize major industrial sectors: petrochemicals and chemicals, iron and steel, and cement. Our RotoDynamic™ technology combines space science, turbomachinery, and chemical engineering to replace the burning of fossil fuels in high-temperature industrial processes with electricity.