Engineering Doctorate in Nuclear Prognostics (EngD)

Doctoral Training in Nuclear Plant Health Prognostics (4 year studentship) for Engineers and Physical Scientists

The next generation of nuclear power requires new tools and technologies for plant health monitoring. The vision of the future includes systems for automatically predicting and quantifying remaining equipment life, allowing pro-active replacement and maintenance of critical assets. These prognostic systems should not only give warning of an impending failure, but predict with enough accuracy the future behaviour and degradation of a system under fault conditions. This requires research into new intelligent software systems.

We are currently recruiting Engineering or Physics graduates for a 2012 start who are up to the challenge of nuclear plant prognostics. As an EngD candidate, you will take Masters level courses on materials, degradation science, and risk management, and split your time between research on the University campus in the heart of Glasgow, and secondments with the industrial partners in Derby, East Kilbride, and various nuclear stations around the UK.

The industrial team includes experts from Rolls Royce Civil Nuclear, reliability engineers and software developers from OSyS, and station monitoring engineers from EDF Energy. This team will give you wide exposure to the commercial and regulatory pressures on plant health monitoring, as well as practical case studies of plant failures and maintenance interventions. The academic team is from the Institute for Energy and Environment within the Department for Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Strathclyde, one of the largest power engineering research groups in Europe. This dynamic team will support you in developing novel prognostic technologies for identifying and predicting the evolution of equipment faults.

You should have graduated or expect to graduate with a first or upper second class honours degree. Familiarity with software development, data analytics, and intelligent systems or artificial intelligence (AI) would be an asset. Applicants from the UK and EU citizens resident in the UK for 3 years are eligible for full financial support, including fees and an enhanced stipend of £19k+ per year tax free.

PhD positions on similar projects are also available. For further information or informal discussion of the opportunities, please contact Dr Victoria Catterson on 0141 548 2538, or Dr Graeme West on 0141 548 5864.