PhD Studentship - Modelling and Simulation of Turbine Wheels Performance

None of positions: 1

This 4 year PhD project is fully funded for home students; the successful candidate will receive an annual tax free stipend set at the UKRI rate (£20,780 for 2025/26) and tuition fees will be paid.

New turbo products for automotive and energy sectors are being constantly developed by Cummins and the material from which the turbine wheel is manufactured is being placed under greater stress. The understanding of the relation between the material microstructure – grain structure, grain orientations, defects – and the in-service performance of the wheel is limited at present. This is a potential cause for non-optimised specifications and unexploited robustness and performance opportunities.

This project is part of a larger undertaking funded by Cummins to develop a product limits map which describes the performance of a turbine wheel with respect to the microstructure through simulation and empirical testing. The aim of the project is to develop a modelling and simulation framework that considers sufficient microstructure details and calculates the thermo-mechanical behaviour of the wheel. The PhD student will work in close collaboration with an experimental PhD student, tasked with microstructure characterisation to inform the model and with performance testing to validate the model predictions. Together, the team will evaluate the empirically and computationally obtained relations between microstructural characteristics and performance and identify isolated critical parameters which positively and/or negatively influence the performance. Based on the evaluation, the team will propose optimisation strategies for the turbine wheel grain microstructure and demonstrate robustness capability against non-optimised components by simulations and experiments.

The project is an exciting opportunity to reach the forefront of modelling materials performance and became a subject matter expert in an area of growing demand both in industry and academia.

Applicants should have or expect to achieve a 1^st class degree in Engineering with strong background in theoretical and computational mechanics of solids/materials.

To apply please contact the supervisor, Prof Andrey Jivkov - andrey.jivkov@manchester.ac.uk. Please include details of your current level of study, academic background and any relevant experience and include a paragraph about your motivation to study this PhD project.

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