Administrative Manager Rachel Funderud Syrtveit attended the annual conference for Business and Research without Borders (Næringslivsdagen 2016). Together with 1100 other participants from national companies, R&D organisations and funding agencies.
See http://www.forskningsradet.no/no/Arrangement/Neringslivsdagen_2016__UTEN_GRENSER/1254015931816.
Petroleum-related study programs in Norway experience a dramatic fall in applicants, in some cases a 90% decline has been reported since 2014. The Mechatronics program at UiA holds steady. Applications to Bachelor Mechatronics is only down 19%, while applications to Master Mechatronics is up 42%. At NTNU Trondheim, the 5-year program Product and Development and Production also holds steady with a decline of only 22% from 2015 to 2016.
At NTNU Aalesund there is no separate educational program in Mechatronics. The application numbers for related programs are (at Master level): Product and system design (-27%), Ship design (+17%), Simulation and visualization (-45%). At NTNU Aalesund Bachelor level the numbers are: Automation (+22%); data (+44%); electric power systems(+100%), product and system design (-28%), ship design (-8%), nautical (-8%).
PhD candidate Martin Hemmer started working on SFI WP5.1 on April 4, 2016. The topic of his work-package is “Analysis of Tapered big bearings”. In the picture above Martin Hemmer (right) is shown together with KD-funded PhD candidate Andreas Klausen and his own developed test bench for bearing analysis for slow rotations.
On April 13 a full-day reference group meeting / workshop was organised at NOV’s offices at Kjøita 21-25, Kristiansand. The goal of the workshop was to present current status and plans, but also to align the research with input from the industry partners. The following partners were present: NTNU, UiA, NOV, MHWirth, Cameron, Bosch Rexroth, Klüber Lubrication and ABB (by video). Several new PhD positions in WP2 and WP4 will be filled during 2016, and the research in these two work-packages is now ramping up. It is of high priority in the SFI that the research in all work-packages is coordinated with the interests of the industrial partners.
Work-Package WP2: Motion Compensation
Wednesday April 13, NOV, Kjøita 21-25, Kristiansand. 2nd Floor, Auditorium Festningen
08:30 – 09:30 WP2: General Overview, status, plans.
09:30 – 10:30 WP2: Ongoing work
10:30 – 11:30 Discussions / Idea generation
Work-Package WP4: Modelling and Simulation
Wednesday April 13, NOV, Kjøita 21-25, Kristiansand. 2nd Floor, Auditorium Festningen
12:15 – 13:15 WP4: General Overview, status, plans.
13:15 – 14:15 WP4: Ongoing work
14:15 – 15:30 Discussions / Idea generation
Work-Package WP6: Data Analytics, IT Integration and Big Data
Friday April 1, Campus Grimstad, C4-095, Time 12:00 – 13:30
The PhD positions WP4.1 (NTNU), WP4.2 (NTNU) and WP5.3 (UiA) are now re-advertised internally for the entire consortium. Employees with a Masters degree and grade average of B or better in all SFI Partner companies are allowed to apply to these positions. The project descriptions are advertised in ProjectPlace (interested candidates should contact HR in their respective company). The application deadlines are April 22 for WP4.1 and WP4.2 and April 13 for WP5.3.
Knut Berg Kaldestad (WP3) will attend the GPU Technology Conference, Silicon Valley, on April 4-7. See http://www.gputechconf.com for more details. Impressions from GTC 2016 will be presented at the SFI Conference, May 10-11 in Grimstad.
The video available at http://folk.ntnu.no/torstem/crane/myhre2016collision_detection.mp4 demonstrates results from WP2.2 High-Performance Control for Motion Compensation. The title of the work is: Collision Detection for Visual Tracking of Crane Loads Using a Particle Filter.
The WP3 presentation at the conference NFA Autonomy, March 2016 is available at: https://sfi.mechatronics.no/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SFI-20160316-Autonomy.pdf
Sondre Sanden Tørdal (UiA) and Per Ove Løvsland (Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus) testing relative motion accuracy using two Kongsberg MRUs, two Stewart platforms, one Comau robot and the FARO laser tracker mounted on top of the smallest Stewart platform. Per Ove is testing the MRUs with radio links as part of his Bachelor thesis at HiOA and the SFI partner company MacGregor in Kristiansand.
