Professional Doctorate in Engineering Maintenance at University of Twente

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 Apollo Vredestein in Enschede. 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 Apollo, high level, creative and new designs for complex issues will be aimed at.

The tyre traction ability plays a crucial role for safety on roads (especially wet), as the tyre is the only contact between the vehicle and the road. Tyre manufactures test the braking distance and wet grip label of tyres intensively at different locations to ensure safety of their products. It is well known that the tyre grip ability depends on the test surface and can vary quite a lot. The interaction between wet road and tyre can be divided into two contributions: a tread pattern and macro roughness play important role in the removal of water from the contact patch and tread material and micro roughness responsible for grip between each other. The prediction of material friction ability at early stage of tyre development is very important. There is a variety of equipment for measuring of material friction ability. The types of surfaces on which (lab) friction can be tested are very limited and not representative for real test tracks. The stability and durability of test surface are other important issues, including initial running for removal of the bitumen. The design and development of laboratory friction test with durable surfaces replicated real different test tracks will be a great advantage for the quick and correct material friction prediction.

Goal and prototype deliverable of the project
The PDEng needs to design new durable test surfaces and compare with real wet test tracks.
Characterization of reference surfaces including macro and micro roughness. Is equal characterisation of road surface of ATP (Papenburg) full scale test section.
Review of existing simple test devices for rubber-(road)surface friction characterization and propose, which will be used for validation.
Design of a test procedure for chosen friction device on reference surface.
Design of test surface prototypes.
Design of a test procedure for bitumen removal and initial polishing or preparation of test surfaces.
Validation of lab test surface prototypes against full-scale reference surfaces, including friction tests for different rubber compounds with wet conditions.
Design a procedure for deducing the effects of polishing the road surface (by running traffic or artificial) in such a way that lab tests can be compared to full-scale tests on real roads.
Design a procedure how to proceed that at wet frictions tests an imposed amount of water is on top of the test sample road surface.

Deadline Application: 30-04-2017

Further details:
Professional Doctorate in Engineering Maintenance at University of Twente