Greater Glasgow Area
How will we make tomorrow's jet engine parts? My role is to research, develop, and implement manufacturing technologies that will power tomorrow's aircraft.
Rolls-Royce sponsored full time Engineering Doctorate concentrating on sheet metal forming of gas turbine engine components. Viva successfully defended March 2019
While working as a project engineer for Rautomead Ltd. located in Dundee Scotland my work mainly circulated around various research and development projects for which I developed new processes and cast new alloys to meet a growing number of customer needs. I managed the research department including the daily activities of a team of technicians, the schedules of several continuous casting machines, and the maintenence and upkeep of a metalurgical laboratory. I was in charge of projects with combined commercial values of several million dollars which ran simultaneously with greatly differing demands, challenges, and machine requirements. My job in these projects involved first meeting with a potential customer and assessing how to make our technology fit their needs and then working out the technical details that would theoretically be required. Then the project would progress to designing and implementing metal casting trials. Then once completed I was responsible for writing up the results of the trials and designing the specialized tooling to allow the alloy to be cast in customer's production facilities. Tooling designs would have to take operations costs, design for manufacturing principles, and the unique hazards of molten metal manufacturing into consideration.
Throughout my time at Nucor I worked on many different projects simultaneously while participating in many different quality (ISO 9000) audits. The main projects that I worked on included: -Creating a standard for tensile testing calibration that was to be used throughout all of the bar mills at Nucor -Creating a computer algorithm that would predict the strength of a grade of steel based on its chemistry & predict the chance of failure (later the topic of my master's thesis) -Performed tests and analysed furnace data to optimize performance based on input/output costs and yield
While working in the melt shop at Nucor Steel Auburn as a mechanical engineering intern I was mainly involved with incoming materials testing. With an extremely tight budget I was tasked with the responsibility of creating new testing procedures and equipment utilizing home made materials and in house talent. After personally designing the proper tests, and creating or gathering all of the necessary equipment I was able to test materials from all of Nucor's different suppliers and subsequently compare materials with efficiency. After all of the necessary testing was accomplished I was able to analyze the data (with the help of other Nucor engineers) and draw a few very important conclusions regarding the correlation between furnace efficiency and scrap quality, as well as the discrepancies between the quality of their suppliers.