Close Cooperation With THREAD PhD Students on Site
Tumiotto's stay in Kaiserslautern is also the start of a close collaboration with Davide Manfredo, who has been a PhD student in the THREAD subproject at Fraunhofer ITWM since April 2020. "The collaboration with Davide is a wonderful part of the experience here at Fraunhofer ITWM. We not only attend the courses planned by the project together, but we also discuss their contents. Furthermore, Davide and his supervisors Joachim Linn and Vanessa Dörlich explain to me their approach to the Cosserat rod model. They teach me how the model works and how they solve the model in space to arrive at a static solution".
The First Network-Wide Training Within THREAD
At the beginning of Tumiotto's secondment, the first virtual network-wide training took place within the framework of THREAD on the topics "Fundamentals of beam theory and flexible multibody dynamics, parameterisation of rotations". It addresses all 14 PhD students of the THREAD program from eight European countries.
The network-wide training includes courses on the fundamentals of nonlinear beam theories and on the fundamentals of multibody dynamics. Besides the purely scientific courses, there are also courses on soft skills. Tumiotto finds these very useful: "Soft skills training is usually not very much considered during a PhD project, but I think they are crucial for any researcher."
About THREAD – The PhD Program of the European Union
Within the framework of the EU-funded doctoral student network «THREAD – Joint Training on Numerical Modelling of Highly Flexible Structures for Industrial Applications», a total of 14 young researchers are working at twelve universities and research institutions from eight European countries. The EU will provide €3.6 million in funding for the doctoral positions.
The research projects focus on the question of how thin flexible structures such as ropes, cable bundles or hoses can be better modelled and simulated on the computer in the future. The application spectrum of the simulation models developed ranges from cable cars for ski lifts and cable harnesses in automotive engineering to medical endoscopes or hoses for maritime applications, for example on drilling platforms.
Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM