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Director: Frédéric Sirois Codirector: Ricardo Izquierdo
End of posting : 30 August 2013
Department of Electrical Engineering, Laboratory in electrical energy
Background: Undergraduate level in engineering physics or electrical engineering.
Skills and interests: Materials science, electric circuits, electromagntetic and thermal modelling.
Personal qualities: Autonomy, critical thinking and creativity. Recommendations from referees (to be sent with the application form) should provide specific comments on each of these aspects.
Citizenship: Due to the presence of industrial partners from the U.S. and Canada, Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada will be offered the position in priority.
Working language: The working language will be English in the meetings involving industrials, and otherwise French in the daily activities.
Context:
The current and future generations of aircrafts and helicopters are increasingly made of composite materials for structural weight savings. However the main drawback of replacing aluminum by composite is an important decrease of the electrical conductivity, which leads to serious consequences for the aircraft and the electronic systems lightning strike protection (LSP). A popular protection approach is to bond a copper mesh on the outer surface of the composite structure using a polymeric resin. This method provides a good LSP but this surface material is heavy, which counterbalances the utilization of composite materials to save weight in the first place. In this project, we propose to develop a lightweight surface material or coating for composite structures in order to improve their electrical conductivity for efficient lightning strike protection while featuring the desired characteristics: high electromagnetic protection, high mechanical resistance, good environmental protection, flexible manufacturability and moderate costs. The advanced material investigation will cover the design of nanocomposites (i.e. mixture of polymer with nanoscopic scale particles for enhanced electrical conductivity. These potential solutions will be electrically characterized with different non- and destructive tests including the testing under high currents using a custom-made screening setup. This multidisciplinary CRIAQ project will be in collaboration between an academic research team from three different institutions and three industrial partners (Bombardier Aerospace, Bell Helicopter Textron Canada Ltd and 3M). This project is directly related to the development of safer public transportation and environmentally friendly "greener" airplanes. It is supported by Canada and Quebec governments.
Project:
In the first phase of the project, the Ph.D. student will be in charge of designing the lightning stroke emulator, with a target of 30-50 kA of peak current. In addition to this, he will have to develop the proper numerical modeling tools to improve our understanding of the electromagnetic phenomena occurring within the composite laminates during a stroke, as a function of the physical properties of the surface (mostly roughness and conductivity) and the composite structure (physical layout of substrate, dielectric strength). The results of these analyses will be correlated to the characterization of the damages induced by a various tests on the samples produced by other members of the team. These tests are of prime importance for prior to making a final choice of coating architecture.
A financial support is available for the sucessful applicants. The amount of financial assistance will be at the level proposed by École Polytechnique, i.e. in the range of 19000 $ per year (Canadian dollars), for a duration of 3 years, in order to help you completing your thesis works efficiently.