Shape Optimisation of Hydraulic Devices

The Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK) is looking for a motivated student to be enrolled in their PhD program.

Project Aims and Objective

Development and application of optimisation methods and tools to find the best shape of existing hydraulic devices – or some of their components – to maximise one or more predefined perfomance based on CFD/FEM modelling.
The evolution of complex systems has progressed along with the development of computational methods that can treat more and more complex design and simulation problems. The increase in computer performance allows numerical simulation to replace a big portion of experimental tests, and numerical optimisation to handle complex design problems. However, generally only reduced or low-fidelity models are used during the optimisation process on sequential machines. Higher fidelity models are used only for more detailed investigations of some promising configurations.
In order to reduce the duration and cost of the design process, while maintaining accuracy of the results obtained, it would be desirable to introduce different level of fidelity models as soon as possible in the design process. On this purpose what it is needed are: automatic approaches and techniques that can adaptively build models of different fidelity levels during the optimisation process, as well as optimisation schemes able to deal with these different level of fidelities (multi-fidelity approaches).
This research project is about the development and use of meta-modelling techniques and mesh coarsening techniques, together with multi-fidelity control approach to optimise the shape of existing hydraulic devices.

Qualifications

Applicants should hold a Masters degree in mechanical engineering or applied mathematics

Experience

Experience in the field of computational fluidodynamics and optimisation is an asset.

Starting date

OPEN

Student eligibility

UK and EU students.

This project is NOT currently funded.

Contact

Edmondo Minisci (name.surname@strath.ac.uk)
Annalisa Riccardi (name.surname@strath.ac.uk)