Prof I jennions, Mr M Esperon
No more applications being accepted
Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)
About the Project
Award type: PhD
Start Date: May 2017
This studentship will provide a bursary of up to £20,000 p.a. (tax free) plus fees* for three years.
This project will build on the research that the IVHM Centre has conducted over the years and will involve close collaboration with the Centre’s industrial partners, particularly BAE Systems.
Military Aircraft are subjected to mandatory periodic inspections in order to meet Continued Airworthiness requirements and to insure availability of the platform. These inspections are often in hazardous or hard to reach areas and often requires additional operations or the removal of equipment to allow the appropriate access.
In order to remove the need for nugatory operations during the inspection process automatic robotic inspection technology could be deployed to reduce costs, improve maintainer safety and increase availability by reducing the timescales of inspections. In addition evidence of the condition of features could be captured for validation purposes.
The process of manual inspection is often recorded in an inconsistent manner and requires manual input onto the required systems. This introduces inaccuracy in the data and makes fault diagnosis and trend analysis more difficult making it difficult to identify corrective actions. The use of automated inspection techniques will provide a more consistent approach highlighting corrective actions.
This project will identify the available and future technologies, highlighting technology gaps that can be combined to meet the various requirements associated with replacing current manual inspection and servicing with automated systems. As an example it will evaluate the viability of one or more technologies to replace a current schedule inspection with an automated system capable of meeting equivalent requirements.
The aim of this project is to identify the technologies available or in development in the fields of robotics, sensing and image processing that can be used to replace line and base maintenance inspections on military vehicles.
Objectives
• Study line and base inspections of military vehicles
• Identify source of requirements for inspections / servicing relative to availability, safety and continuing airworthiness
• Identify technologies that could be used to provide an automated alternative to manual inspection/servicing
• Select use cases
• Define a set of requirements for automated systems capable of replacing the manual inspections selected for the use case.
• Perform trade-of-analysis of technologies available.
• For one or more use cases (to be agreed with BAES) provide a combination of simulated and experimental evaluation of one or more technologies against the identified requirements.
• Analyse the vehicle-maintainer-robot interaction, examine the challenges they present in terms of systems integration, and issue recommendations on how to address them.
Entry requirements:
Applicants should have a first or second class UK honors degree or equivalent in a related discipline, such as mechanical engineering, electronics engineering, or aerospace engineering. The candidate should be self-motivated, have good communication skills for regular interaction with other stakeholders, with an interest for industrial research.
How to apply:
For further information please contact:
Dr. Manuel Esperon Miguez, E: [Email Address Removed], T: +44 (0) 1234 754057.
If you are eligible to apply for this research studentship, please complete the online application form:
https://www.cranfield.ac.uk/research/phd/Robotics-for-Automated-Maintenance-Inspections
For further information contact us today:
T: 44 (0)1234 758008
E: [Email Address Removed]
Funding Notes
* To be eligible for this funding you must be a UK or EU national.