Mechanical engineering internships

Supervisor: Dr Agisilaos Kourmatzis, Taye Mekonnen

Eligibility: Strong interest in fluid mechanics. Strong skills in Matlab preferred. WAM>80. Must be at least in Year 3 of degree.

Project Description:

The use of intranasal drug delivery as a means of effective self-vaccination has a lot of interest, but so many questions remain with regards to how aerosol is transported through the human nasal channels and what the mechanisms of drug transport are once the drug has made contact with human tissue. Similar questions persist in our understanding of more traditional inhaler devices.

These inhalers are not only used for treatment of common respiratory diseases such as asthma and COPD, but also for delivery of inhaled antibiotics. At the core of controlling the efficacy of these delivery systems, is a need to understand the turbulent fluid mechanics of droplets in complex geometries.

In this project you will work on either experimental work, computational modelling, or in the design of new devices, to improve our ability to deliver pharmaceutical aerosols for specific applications.

Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice.

Supervisors: Dr Agisilaos Kourmatzis, Troy Cross, Taye Mekonnen

Eligibility: Strong interest in fluid mechanics. Strong skills in Matlab, CFD, or experimental work. WAM>80. Must be at least in Year 3 of degree.

Project Description:

The current guidelines around exposure to bushfire smoke or harmful particulates are based around a monitoring of the PM2.5 level. i.e. what is the concentration of particles that are below 2.5u.. If the concentration is too high, advice is given to avoid exposure. Well what if we had a scenario A: where 90% of the particles are 2um big and the other 10% were 2.5um big and scenario B: 50% of the particles are 2um big, 50% are 0.5um big. The latter situation contains ultrafine particles-yet their presence is not reflected at all in the current guidelines.

We are developing a in-vitro test platform that can simulate various bushfire smoke, and developing a test bed that can simulate a variety of inhalations, from normal breathing to exercise level breathing. This lets us understand how exposure guidelines should be tuned both based on the particle characteristics and based on individual profile.

Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice.

Supervisor: Dr Agisilaos Kourmatzis

Eligibility: Strong interest in fluid mechanics. Strong skills in Matlab, CFD, or experimental work. WAM>80. Must be at least in Year 3 of degree.

Project Description:  The Thermo fluids & Combustion groups in the School of AMME work on a broad variety of applications which require application of multiphase and multiphysics flows.

One area we are very active in is the design of systems to provide better control over the delivery of turbulent sprays. Key projects in this area include delivery of fuel sprays for use in gas turbine combustors, water sprays for fire suppression, and spray injection over the Great Barrier Reef for “marine cloud brightening”.

Whilst these applications are all very different, at the core of all of them is analysis of highly turbulent, and extremely complex transient sprays. We use a variety of advanced experimental methods to probe these flows mainly using high speed imaging systems.

We are looking for an outstanding candidate interested in working on one or more of injector design, advanced experimental technique development, image processing methods, or computational modelling.

Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice.

Supervisor: Dr Xianghai An

Eligibility: High achievement in a relevant undergraduate engineering degree (a WAM of 75 or above). This project has the option to be combined with an honours project.

Project Description:

Over millennia, the basic alloying strategy of adding small amounts of secondary atoms into a primary element has remained unchanged, limiting the total number of alloys and thus the reachable properties. The recently developed multiple-principal element alloys (MPE) alloys, can essentially address this shortfall, presenting a multitude of new opportunities for materials properties due to the vast compositional space previously inaccessible. It has been revealed that the exceptional properties and functionalities of MPE alloys originate from their compositional heterogeneities at the atomic level.

In this project, we will apply the advanced manufacturing methods to enable the nanostructure engineering of MPE alloys, aiming to intelligently integrate multilevel chemical and structural heterogeneities, from sub-nanoscale and up, into the MPE alloys towards the superior combinations of properties that are beyond current benchmark ranges.

By delicately tailoring the parameters, the local chemical composition and nanostructures can be regulated to enable the rapid construction of complex heterogeneities from the bottom-up manner. This project will open up a new avenue for engineer the multiscale microstructure/chemical heterogeneities to design next-generation, high-performance, and sustainable alloys.

Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice.

Supervisors: Dr Xianghai An

Eligibility: High achievement in a relevant undergraduate engineering degree (a WAM of 75 or above). This project has the option to be combined with an honours project.

Project Description:

Materials come with characteristic combinations of mechanical properties. For example, ceramics have high stiffness but break easily; metals have high strength and ductility but limited ability to deform elastically. A vital requirement for all structural materials is that they possess an exceptional combination of stiffness, strength, ductility and damage tolerance. However, these characteristics cannot currently be obtained simultaneously. Although materials with different combinations of attributes can be designed by forming composites of different materials, it is still scientifically and technologically challenging to harvest desirable combination of properties.

To address these issues, in this project, we will propose a multi-design strategy, which encompasses the deliberate modulation of the phase constitution and architecture of metal-ceramic interpenetrating-phase composites that can be enabled by the combination of advanced manufacturing techniques. The newly designed materials will push the boundaries of materials properties beyond current benchmark ranges.

Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice.

Supervisor: Dr Xianghai An

Eligibility: High achievement in a relevant undergraduate engineering degree (a WAM of 75 or above). This project has the option to be combined with an honours project.

Project Description:

High-performance alloys are the backbone of decarbonising innovations in manufacturing, infrastructure, energy, and transportation. Stronger alloys will substantially improve mechanical and energy efficiencies, which can benefit our economy and environment directly. However, high-strength materials typically have low ductility and are more vulnerable to fracture. Furthermore, they are also susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement (HE) in many service environments for renewable energy applications such as hydrogen transportation and the bearings of wind turbines.

Hydrogen-induced embrittlement can lead to unpredictable and catastrophic failures at relatively low applied stresses. These critical shortcomings cause serious safety concerns but cannot be readily addressed by traditional materials development approaches that generally render materials property trade-offs between strength and ductility/HE resistance. Gradient structures are an emerging material-design paradigm inspired by nature that has great potential to overcome these alloy design trade-offs.

This project aims to develop an innovative design strategy of gradient segregation engineering (GSE) to produce high-performance alloys by synergistically introducing a chemical gradient via grain boundary (GB) segregation and a physical gradient by nanostructure control. The novel GSE will entail a synergy of multiscale strengthening mechanisms that offer an exceptional strength-ductility combination and simultaneously enable the hierarchical HE-resisting mechanisms to notably enhance the hydrogen tolerance.

Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice.

Supervisor: Dr Xianghai An

Eligibility: High achievement in a relevant undergraduate engineering degree (a WAM of 80 or above). This project has the option to be combined with an honours project.

Project Description:

The past two decades have witnessed a rapid increase in demand for micro/nano devices and components, such as micro/nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS)/(NEMS) sensors, micro-engines, connectors, micro-pumps, and medical implants, to push the boundary of property and functionality for many evolving technologies.

This essential requirement for device miniaturisation promotes an unprecedented advancement in manufacturing techniques and processes, empowering us to fabricate these small structures at micrometer, submicrometer, and even nanometer scales. During practical application and service, these novel systems would ineluctably suffer from external loading and large deformation. Therefore, their robustness and reliability rely primarily on the mechanical performance of small-sized materials.

However, when the external geometric sizes of materials are diminished into the micro/nanoscale, their mechanical responses are profoundly distinct from those of bulk counterparts. Comprehensively exploring the mechanical behaviour of the micro-/nano-sized materials is not only significant scientifically to furnish principal insights into their deformation physics to enrich the theory of crystal plasticity, but also crucial technologically to empower us to exert control over the design and development of cutting-edge MEME/NEMS with predictable, reliable, and reproducible performances.  

Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice.