PhD Scholarship in Automation of Tool Wear Measurement and Data Driven RUL Estimation for Sustainable Machining Operations

The Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has an open PhD position (3 years) on the topic of “Automation of tool wear measurement and data driven RUL estimation for sustainable machining operations”.

Nowhere in the text, it is explained what the abbreviation RUL stands for.

The position is funded in the context of the project MADE React co-funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark. The PhD student will be working in the framework of the ongoing collaboration between DTU Construct, and Danish companies with interest in implementing solutions for effective tool wear management. This position offers unique opportunities with respect to high level research, training and innovation within manufacturing engineering, in an exciting combination of academic and industrial environments. The selected candidate will receive strong guidance from academic supervisors as well as from industrial experts. 

Responsibilities and qualifications

In the domain of high precision machining, tools are prematurely discarded to avoid the risk of costly non-conformities. This creates a large loss of value of strategically valuable raw materials and waste of energy related to material, cutting tools and parts production.

The PhD project will therefore focus on the development of an integrated system combining direct and indirect tool wear monitoring for reliable residual life estimation of rotating tools. Direct tool wear characterization will be based on optical measurement systems and data processing to achieve wear feature recognition and quantification. Indirect tool wear monitoring will be based on real time data streaming from the machine numerical control. The project will cover all the aspects related to the implementation and automation of the tool life cycle management thus including sensing systems, tool condition features selection, algorithms for automated signal preprocessing, feature extraction and decision making based on ML and AI. An integral part of the project will be the development of physics enhanced data driven methods to achieve reliable prediction of residual usable life of milling tools.

The approach will be validated by application to industrial production at a partner company.

The position includes both theoretical and experimental work and carries project as well as academic responsibilities. The scientific work conducted must be positioned relative to current literature and published in conference and journal articles. 

You are required to have an excellent academic background and must have a strong knowledge of production engineering technologies and manufacturing systems for subtractive manufacturing. Strong knowledge of process monitoring, manufacturing metrology, and programming tools such as Matlab is highly desirable. You should have good analytical skills as well as good communication skills in English.

You should have completed a two-year master's degree (120 ECTS points) in Mechanical, Production, Materials, Industrial or Robotics Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline, or a similar degree with an equivalent academic level. 

Application procedure 

To apply, please read the full job advertisement by clicking the 'Apply' button

Read more about DTU at www.dtu.dk/english

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