Applications are invited for a three years full-time funded PhD research studentship in the Faculty of Engineering and Computing. The studentship is part of a £1.2million Technology Strategy Board funded programme to develop a commercial CAE tool for assessing and predicting the durability of adhesive and hybrid joints under constant and variable amplitude loads to simulate road conditions.
The successful applicant will be expected to support and contribute to all three parts of the programme. This studentship will involve working closely with the software company to develop and test new software tools for a range of joint types including adhesive joints, riveted joints, spot welded joints, and hybrid joints combining adhesives with rivets or spot welds.
The project will run within the Advanced Joining Research Centre at the university, in collaboration with nCode a leading analysis software company and Jaguar Cars a market leader in aluminium car technology. This studentship offers an excellent opportunity for a mechanical engineer to become a recognised technical expert in the growing field of CAE analysis for fatigue and durability.
The increasing emphasis on light weighting car body structures to reduce CO2 emissions and fuel consumption, increase performance, and employ recyclable materials has made aluminium the material of choice for many performance and luxury cars makers. Most lightweight vehicle bodies employ adhesives in combination with riveted or spot welded joints to improve the stiffness and fatigue performance.
There is currently no commercially available software tool to analyse and predict the durability of these joints and the lack of an effective software tool is resulting in over-engineering of designs adding unnecessary cost and weight. The purpose of developing these new software tools is to give transport designers the ability to determine the type, location and quantity of joints required to optimise their designs for durability, cost, ease of manufacture, weight, and end of life part separation for recycling, enabling intelligent business decisions to be made.
This programme has three parts; testing of real joints to gather durability data for modelling, developing a CAE software tool to employ the data, and testing of full vehicle bodies to verify the modelling results.
Main Duties and Responsibilities
- To support the development of the new modelling software and conduct modelling studies. Such as predicting the results of the full body tests using the data generated by the individual coupon tests.
- To conduct innovative and commercially valuable work on behalf of the consortium partners.
- To produce regular reports of suitable quality to be circulate to the industrial partners.
- To contribute to the task of making and testing a wide range of specimens to generate data to populate the materials database for the new modelling software.
- To work in a confidential manner with materials and design data considered commercially sensitive by the partner companies.
- To support the testing of full vehicle bodies to verify the results of the modelling work, recording and reporting the results.
- To produce a PhD thesis and at least one publication per year in an academic journal, conference, or industrial magazine.
- To contribute to improving the level and content of teaching at the university by helping to establish a student projects involving the use of the analysis software being employed by this project.
AND such other duties as are within the scope and spirit of the job purpose, the title of the post and it’s grading.
A 1st class or upper 2nd class honours degree in the mechanical engineering from a recognised academic institution is required. Along with strong theoretical and numerical analysis skills and experience in computer modelling and finite element analysis techniques.
The studentship is suitable for UK & EU applicants and provides a maintenance grant at the standard EPSRC rate of £12,900 per annum plus course fees (at the UK/EU rate) for three years.
International students may apply, but should be aware that no additional funding is available to cover the additional £7,200 per annum of overseas tuition fees. An IELTS score of 7 or above is required for applicants who do not have English as a first language.
To apply please complete the application form and monitoring form and return them to Human Resources by email on futures.per@coventry.ac.uk.
Alternatively, you can post your application to :
Human Resource
Coventry University
Priory Street
COVENTRY
CV1 5FB
Tel: 024 7688 8120
Fax: 024 7688 8131
e-mail:futures.per@coventry.ac.uk
Please quote the position Ref No: A1408
The closing date for receiving applications is 30 April 2008 . Appointment interviews will be held in May 2008.
For further details, please read the job description document.
The studentship will commence in June 2008 and last for a three year period at the end of which it is expected that the PhD will have been completed.
