European universities and industry join forces to produce a new generation of engineers in frontier technology
The UPC coordinates the European project AdMoRe, in which eight researchers—seven men and one woman—are being trained in advanced simulation and computational mechanics technologies to develop innovative solutions for industry and help large European companies in fast decision-making when they tackle common problems in industrial processes.
Sep 26, 2019
Guillem Barroso, Luca Borchini, Rubén Ibáñez, Ramiro Mena, Giacomo Quaranta, Marcos Seoan, Vasileios Tsiolakis and Simona Vermiglio are the eight young researchers from European countries who are participating in the AdMoRe: TAdvanced Model Reduction for Real-Time, Inverse and Optimization in Industrial Problems project.
The project, coordinated by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC), is led by Antonio Huerta, a member of the Numerical Methods for Applied Sciences and Engineering (LaCàN) research group and a professor at the Barcelona School of Civil Engineering (ETSECCPB), and developed within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions in the European research programme Horizon 2020. It has a budget of around 2.1 million euros for a period of four years (from October 2015 to September 2019) and aims to train, prepare and provide industry with a new generation of engineers who will develop innovative solutions for daily use in production environments.
The business partners in this project are leaders in their respective fields: the French companies Airbus and ESI Group, the British Siemens Healthineers and the German Volkswagen AG. The academic partners are the UPC, the École Centrale de Nantes (France) and Swansea University (United Kingdom).
The solutions developed are based on innovative computational mechanics tools, in particular numerical methods for the simulation of problems of interest for industry. These are cutting-edge engineering systems that will provide partner companies with tools for real-time decision-making when they are faced with certain issues that arise throughout the production process: design, manufacturing control, non-destructive testing, etc. The systems in this project are being developed to solve typical production problems in the aeronautical and automotive industries and in the manufacture of prototypes and medical devices.
Cutting-edge simulations
These young researchers aim to develop a state-of-the-art computational model that provides fast and accurate solutions to empower real-time decision-making. Their research projects thus envisage creating applications of great interest to industry to address multiple queries in an efficient and accurate manner in order to optimise the processes involved and make them more cost-efficient.
Two of the researchers are working with and being trained by academic and industrial coordinators on the UPC’s North Campus in Barcelona. The UPC is the only Spanish institution in the project. Three other researchers are in France, two in the United Kingdom and one in Germany. All of them are working in research teams and have access to world-class research and calculation facilities.
These research projects are expected to provide each industrial partner with customised modelling techniques, that is, to incorporate software prototypes with user-friendly interfaces into a daily industrial production environment in order to increase performance and efficiency.
Multidisciplinary training and business skills
To address the specific problems of their industrial partners, the training of these researchers integrates various types of fields of study: classical multidisciplinary modelling for engineering (solids, fluids, electromagnetism, acoustics), interdisciplinary modelling (fluid-structure interaction; electrical, magnetic and mechanical coupling; thermomechanical phenomena) and numerical techniques for the precise simulation of physical problems and computational cost saving.
In addition, they are encouraged to enhance their entrepreneurial spirit and trained to develop core entrepreneurial skills to successfully move ideas into commercial practice as part of their training. The active involvement of industrial partners is essential in this type of training.
