A fully-funded PhD fellowship in acoustics is available in UK. Applicants should apply as soon as possible.

Rapid changes in the marine industry due to the introduction and advancements within telecommunications are predicted, and it has been suggested that the vast majority of commercial vessels will be broadband capable within the very near future. Increased data transfer rates are expected to lead to a change in the industry’s approach to, and desired for, optimised Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) systems for fault detection, isolation and prediction of marine diesel engines.

An optimised stand-alone PHM solution for small to medium-sized marine diesel engines could provide improved energy efficiency, which could result in cost and environmental benefits. If the state of health or condition of a system, subsystem or component is known, condition-based maintenance can be carried out, and system design optimisation can be achieved thereby reducing the total cost of ownership and efficiency of the system.

The focus of the proposed project is to design and develop IoT solutions for machine learning-based predictive maintenance with medium-sized marine diesel engines. The design of such systems will rely on vibration and acoustic sensors as primary data sources, and machine learning models for predictive maintenance and fault. These systems’ aim is to detect future engine failures and help scheduling maintenance in advance.

Furthermore, this project will also explore the utilisation of energy harvesting solutions which can potentially lead to the development of a battery-free predictive maintenance system.

The supervision team for the PhD is Dr Domenico Balsamo and Dr Rishad Shafik, experts in hardware and software design for embedded systems and IoT. Royston Diesel Power Company.

You should have, or expect to achieve, at least a 2:1 Honours degree, or international equivalent in Electrical and Electronic Engineering or closely related discipline.

– attach a covering letter and CV. The covering letter must state the title of the studentship, quote reference code ENG069 and state how your interests and experience relate to the project