PDEng Maintenance - Several positions expected soon (open application)

The Professional Doctorate in Engineering (PDEng) programme Maintenance is very interesting for you. The PDEng programme is a 2-year post MSc technological programme with a focus on technological design. This programme at the University of Twente contains an educational part that will be followed at the University, and a design project that will be carried out at a company. The educational programme will have an in-depth and broadening character with ample attention for professional development and will be partly tailored to the design project. In collaboration with a company, high level, creative and new designs for complex issues will be aimed at.

PDEng Design Projects - Several positions expected soon
The PDEng programme Maintenance educates technological designers who are capable to design efficient and effective maintenance processes from a multidisciplinary perspective. For a design to comply with an integral maintenance-aware solution, technical, financial, logistics and organisational specifications need to be set and fulfilled. A major challenge in this comes from the fact that maintenance is a dynamic process, where the process should continuously be adjusted based on changes in the system and its environment. In this, a sound understanding of the physical mechanisms is key, as the basis for failing systems and components is in nature physical. To be able to predict the performance of a design in highly dynamic (undefined) situations requires a theoretical (based) approach.

Currently there is a large gap in maintenance approach between technical specialists and operations managers, originating from different perspectives on maintenance. By addressing both technical and operations aspects during the PDEng programme, a necessary, clear (however missing) link is established between these two fields of expertise.
Examples of design issues include:

The redesign of the texturing process in steel mills. Currently this is done using a texture on the rollers. However, this texture is subjected to very harsh conditions and is thus facing high wear rates. This results in an unwanted evolution of the imprinted textures. Using for example a contactless method can solve this issue; currently the possibility to use laser texturing is investigated.

Decision tool for determination of failure mechanism. One of the biggest issues in designing maintenance policies is the fact that historical data is needed. The more accurate this data is, the more reliable the models will be. However, in practice the number of failure modes of the different systems is almost infinite. In contrast the number of basic failure mechanisms causing the failure is very limited. Typically the engineer responsible for the repair in the field is not very motivated to write a detailed report about the underlying mechanism of a failure or is not trained to recognize the different failure mechanisms. Therefore, a predefined failure chart, which is linked to the physical failure mechanisms, will significantly improve the quality of failure reports from the field.

Development of efficient monitoring strategies enabling condition based maintenance. Modern devices/assets/machines are equipped with an increasing amount of sensors. For example, a modern combustion engine is equipped with over 50 sensors. However, only few of these sensors are used for condition monitoring. Typically only a threshold is set for shut down (mostly related to safety issues). However, the degradation and remaining lifetime is not estimated. This results in a large amount of data that is lost while being potentially of very high value to the maintenance process. Therefore, an investigation should be done into the possibilities of using this type of data for condition monitoring enabling the usage of now redundant data. Next to this, there are many cases where adding a relatively simple sensor to the system can generate valuable data on the condition of a system at minimum costs. These possibilities will be investigated for the cases that are input from the industrial partners involved.
On the short term, we are searching for trainees for several Design Projects. Interested? Please send us an open application.

Deadline Application: 01-04-2016

Further details:
https://www.academictransfer.com