Resilience for UK Manufacturing

How industries prepare for and recover from major incidents/ natural disasters has been shown in the last 2 years to need further improvement. Over the COVID 19 period we have seen significant issues and new opportunities for manufacturing. It is early days in the development of resilience models, however these are not focused on the manufacturing industry. Developing more robust processes and models to test and model robustness, expanding processing envelopes potentially will be helpful. This PhD will develop resilience models for industry. Much industry has aging assets and a strategic plan is needed to handle the changes and issues that are expected to cause issues for the industry over the next 30+ years such that efficient and effective design changes and strategies can be developed. This PhD needs to look at the emerging issues, and challenge the current standard design methodologies and construction methodologies and propose, develop and test new ways of working and strategies.

A full program of development is provided for PhD students including relevant training dependant on the needs of the student in programming, modelling and other aspects relevant to the project. In addition significant employability support will be given. 

Students from our department and in particular with modelling PhD’s are very successful in gaining excellent roles in industry in modelling, Machine learning, other roles in a wide range of companies. The department and the PI have very significant links in industry and mentors will be sought to support the student’s future interests in industry or academia in addition to the PI. Students are also very successful in moving to very strong Post Doc positions and onto academic positions.

The student will be part of the Cordiner and Sol Brown Groups, very significant opportunities to work with partner companies in the process industries. This is in addition to the excellent University and Department structured support and training for PhD students.

Please see this link for information on how to apply: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/cbe/postgraduate/phd/how-apply. Please include the name of your proposed supervisor and the title of the PhD project within your application.

A degree in Engineering is required. Some experience in modelling, machine learning and python programming would be very helpful. Experience or interest in resilience modelling/ thinking would be helpful. If English is not your first language then you must have an International English Language Testing System (IELTS) average of 6.5 or above with at least 6.0 in each component, or equivalent. Please see this link for further information: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/phd/apply/english-language.