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Everyday life of a PhD candidate

4/20/2016

 
Siri Marthe Arbo started her PhD in August 2015. During her PhD, she will look at primarily two dissimilar metals, steel and aluminium, and she will try to find a new way of joining the two metals together. Below she will give you an update about her everyday life as a PhD candidate in SFI Manufacturing.

A lot of trying and failing have filled my first months as a PhD candidate, as well as a lot of paperwork, spending hours writing my project description and teaching duties – however, this means that no day is equal!

How does a typical day look like?
A typical day starts with spending too many minutes going through my mail, drinking some coffee and going over what has to be done that day. I have a four-year PhD, which means that I have teaching duties at the university, helping first and second year chemistry students with laboratory exercises in different chemistry courses.

This semester I am working with the students taking a laboratory course in Inorganic chemistry, so a typical day for me usually including spending one or more hours during my day, preparing for the next experiments that we are going to perform, correcting the reports from last time or spending my afternoon in the laboratory helping out with the experiments. This is a lot of fun, but also a bit challenging from time to time. However, I am learning a lot from my teaching duties and it makes my weeks more fun and interesting.

And the rest of the week?
The rest of my week will be spend on my own project. I can be all from trying to find new interesting articles, reading up on  the literature or planning my next experiments. Last month we performed some initial compression tests of our aluminum and steel samples, in order to study how the aluminum and steel deforms compared to the deformation we have observed in the simulations. These samples needs to be metallographically prepared so that I can study them using light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy.

​Some days I will spend in the laboratory, trying to find the optimal sample preparation method for the samples and to improve my own sample preparation skills. Other days, I spend more time on different tasks that we need to perform, such as risk assessment of our project, obligatory PhD courses or planning my semester abroad.

What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment, we are soon ready to perform the first initial tests where we combine the compression already studied with rotation. The goal is to systematically vary the different process parameters and study how these affect the joining of the two metals. We have, based on simulations and guessing come up with a test plan, which I am putting the final touches on.

We have received the samples from the workshop and now we are waiting for everything to come together before we begin. These tests are very important for my work and will decide where to go from here, and what we should first of all focus on!

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Compression tests of aluminum and steel samples. Photo's: Siri Marthe Arbo

SFI Manufacturing's Annual Report 2015

4/2/2016

 
SFI Manufacturing is a cross-disciplinary centre for research based innovations for competitive high value manufacturing in Norway. The research centre has had a good start-up period. – I am very pleased to see how our strong consortium of industrial- and academic partners is developing SFI Manufacturing into a vital research centre, says centre manager Sverre Gulbrandsen-Dahl.

SFI Manufacturing's vision is to show that sustainable manufacturing in a high-cost country like Norway is possible, given the right products, technologies and people. Cross-disciplinary research in multi-material products and processes, automated production and innovative organizations will provide a knowledge based toolbox for future industrial innovations.

Good start-up period
The research centre has had a good start-up period. – I am very pleased to see how our consortium is developing SFI Manufacturing into a vital research centre, says centre manager Sverre Gulbrandsen-Dahl. – The research activities in 2015 were mainly focused on defining focus areas for in-depth research. This work has resulted in a detailed plan for 2016, several state-of-the-art surveys, and the recruitment of to highly qualified PhD-candidates.

During the first year, the participation in workshops has been excellent, and both Sandvik Teeness and Norsk Hydro have joined the consortium. – We hope this is an indication of the centre's relevance and attractiveness for the Norwegian manufacturing industry. Our intention is to develop this further.

Competence as an engine for change
The reduced growth of oil revenues and the need for economical change highlights productivity as an increasingly important prerequisite for Norway's competitiveness and welfare. SFI Manufacturing builds on existing national capabilities and aims to strengthen manufacturing companies' ability to innovate.

– We know that Norway can gain global competiveness, also without a single oil-lubricated crown, says Sverre Gulbrandsen-Dahl. – Joint competence centres based on industrial clusters may be Norway's change engines.

​Read SFI Manufacturing's first annual report.

​Download the report as PDF-file.
​
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