Interactive Semi-automatic Generation And Assessment Of Design Alternatives In Engineering

The passenger aircraft industry is heading into an era of rapid innovation, with environmental impact constraints demanding massive technological departures from the status quo. Working with engineers from AIRBUS, as a holder of this fully funded PhD studentship, you will help develop new computational tools required to accomplish this leap towards decarbonising aviation.

The current generation of design tools was conceived to facilitate incremental improvements on systems with a largely frozen layout. This PhD will focus on using the latest geometry modelling/machine learning/AI techniques to develop approaches that automate the exploration of large design spaces, thus enabling radical, new solutions. This will be especially important in application areas where there is limited legacy design knowledge to rely on to steer optimisation processes, such as liquid Hydrogen (LH2) fuel systems and electric propulsion systems.

The underlying research questions have multiple facets and the student will thus have some flexibility, working with the supervisors, in choosing a line of enquiry that best suits your interests, spanning geometry modelling, numerical optimization, AI algorithms, physics-based form finding techniques, and designer/computer interface development.

This PhD also offers the rare opportunity to join two vibrant teams working at the cutting edge of design and design tool development: the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at the University of Southampton and, as part of a secondment of at least six months, an engineering team at AIRBUS, Filton. Your supervisory team will also include researchers from both the University and AIRBUS.