To meet emerging sustainability and product performance goals, engineers need revolutionary design tools. The “Re-imagining Engineering Design” (RIED) Programme sets out to explore a radical new engineering design system using bio-inspired methodologies.
A crucial aspect of this new design system is the ability to generate concepts rapidly and simulate their performance in parallel as the design evolves. This requires revolutionary simulation capabilities, with are highly automated, adaptive and efficient. This PhD project will look to investigate these new approaches, integrate them into emerging design tools and demonstrate them on a range of products.
The PhD candidate will work in a large project team which consists of three universities and 20+ researchers. Apart from the supervision from the supervisory team, support will also be available from post-doctoral researchers and peer PhD researchers in the team. Further information: https://riedesign.org/
Project Description:
In RIED it is envisaged that just as organisms develop by adapting to the natural world around them, improved products can be developed through creation of virtual seeds, environments and stimuli. By subjecting the virtual product to real world conditions during the growth process, informed development decisions can be made throughout. Simulation will therefore play a crucial role in the success of the endeavour.
Existing simulation workflows are predominantly sequential in nature, requiring a defined geometry which is pre-processed to produce an analysis model fit for a pre-defined purpose. When the next design iteration is complete, the process is repeated to produce a new analysis model. Iterations continue until an acceptable design is achieved or development time is exhausted.
In the RIED design system a much more agile and adaptive approach to simulation is required. Multiple analysis representations may be required as a product grows, dependent on the geometry, environmental stimuli in play or the physics of interest. Crucially, these analysis representations must remain intrinsically linked, enabling transfer of results, boundary conditions and hence multi-disciplinary decision making.
Aims and Objectives:
The aim of this project is to develop adaptive simulation approaches suitable for informing development within a bio-inspired design system.
- Determine the requirements for simulation capability within a bio-inspired design system (RIED).
- Investigate existing simulation techniques and perform a gap-analysis to the established requirements.
- Develop prototype simulation technology and support its integration within an existing bio-inspired design system (RIED).
- Derive and complete experiments to assess the effectiveness of the newly developed capabilities.
International studentships, where available, will also cover tuition fees and include an equivalent maintenance stipend.
Further information: https://www.qub.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate-research/mechanical-engineering-phd.html#projects
Application deadline: 31st August 2023
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