PhD Studentship: Application of Additive Manufacturing to Highly Efficient Industrial Gas Turbines

Highly efficient industrial gas turbines are essential to the delivery of clean power for a wide variety of power generation and technical drive applications. New technologies are being developed to allow operation at increased temperatures with reduced cooling and other losses, to improve efficiency and operational flexibility. Additive manufacturing is being used to bring new concepts and components into gas turbines. An increasing range of high performance materials are being adopted and more complex components being designed to increase functionality. The project will develop methods and approaches which support the introduction of high quality and reliable complex components into gas turbines. The project is supported by Siemens Industrial Turbo Machinery in Lincoln. Siemens recently announced the first full load testing of an additively manufactured gas turbine blade at the Lincoln site.

The Department is home to a number of exciting and high profile initiatives around advanced manufacturing and materials research. MAPP is a new £10m Future Manufacturing Hub in Manufacture using Advanced Powder Process funded by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC). MAPP’s vision is to deliver on the promise of powder-based manufacturing processes to provide low energy, low cost and low waste high value manufacturing routes and products to secure UK manufacturing productivity and growth. MAPP is located within the newly established Sir Henry Royce Institute (SHRI) for Materials Research. MAPP will recouple manufacturing process development with the underpinning materials science, with a research programme spanning the fundamentals of powder materials, advanced in-situ process monitoring and characterisation, and new approaches to modelling and control.

Funding Notes

This studentship will pay tuition fees in full and a stipend for living expenses for 4 years. This stipend will be at the RCUK minimum which for the 2017/18 year is £14,553pa plus a top up of £3,500pa. This figure may rise in line with inflation in subsequent years. This studentship will be provided by the University of Sheffield and Siemens Industrial Turbo Machinery.
To be eligible, you must be a U.K. citizen who has been resident in the UK for at least 3 years prior to starting the degree. Under exceptional cases, EU applicants may be considered.