The School faculty members conduct basic and applied research in their fields of interest, with the support of graduate students and of a number of external collaborators. The large number of publications in peer-reviewed international journals and in proceedings of international conferences, as well as the citations obtained, confirm the success of their work. The research conducted in the School is supported by an increasing number of competitive research grants, contracts and projects, with EU, public, and private organization funding.
The research areas for each School Section are mentioned briefly below:
- Section of Industrial Management and Operational Research
- Section of Thermal Engineering
- Section of Mechanical Design and Automatic Control
- Section of Nuclear Engineering
- Section of Fluids
- Section of Manufacturing Technology
Section of Industrial Management and Operational Research
- Production planning and control with applications in industry, public transport, Public
Power Corp. etc.
- Operational Research methods and their applications.
- Management information systems in production/operations.
- Control of Quality.
- Productivity analysis and measurement.
Section of Thermal Engineering
- Thermodynamic analysis, behaviour of refrigerants and performance of related
installations.
- Heat and mass transfer in thermal devices.
- Refrigeration - Air Conditioning - Climatological data and heat transfer in buildings.
- Thermal applications of Solar Energy.
- Operational characteristics of power plants.
- Experimental and theoretical analysis of combustion.
- Cycle simulation of Diesel and Otto engines.
- Experimental investigation of operation characteristics and emitted pollutants from
Internal Combustion Engines.
- Use of alternative fuels in Internal Combustion Engines.
- Energy conservation - Pollution abatement technology.
Section of Mechanical Design and Automatic Control
- Theoretical and experimental design of machine elements.
- Design for manufacturing, quality and cost.
- Design optimizaiton methods.
- Automatic control systems.
- Denymaics of structures, machines and robots.
- Vehicle design.
- Computer aided engineering (CAE).
Section of Nuclear Engineering
- g-spectroscopy.
- Thermohydraulic analysis of nuclear reactors.
- a-spectroscopy.
Section of Fluids
- Compressible and incompressible Aerodynamics.
- Combustion Aerodynamics.
- Fluid dynamics of flow-machines (turbomachinery).
- Environment.
- Biofluidmechanics.
- Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics.
Section of Manufacturing Technology
Research is conducted in the following areas: manufacturing processes, design and production of advanced materials, manufacturing automation, manufacturing systems and optimization of structures under intense loading. Research activities are supported by the Manufacturing Technology Laboratory possessing a wide range of modern machinery and test rigs as well as state-of-the-art computing equipment and engineering software. Research encompasses both theory and experiment being and is oriented to current issues in manufacturing technology being often conducted in collaboration with industry. In particular, the Section’s activities can be categorized as follows:
- Numerical simulation of manufacturing processes and mechanical behaviour of materials, mostly based on finite element analysis software.
- Plasticity theory, fracture theory and stress wave propagation.
- Material production: static and dynamic compaction of metal and ceramic powders (high temperature superconductors, superhard materials) bio-ceramic plasma-sprayed coatings, smart materials.
- Non-conventional processes (explosive and electromagnetic forming, explosive welding).
- Composite material (laminated etc.) structures.
- High precision manufacturing processes, nanotechnology, development of related advanced materials.
- Material and structure design for passive protection against dynamic loads (hybrid material and structure systems development, crash analysis, automotive and aerospace engineering applications).
- Computer aided process planning: expert systems, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, manufacturing feature technology.
- Analysis, design and simulation of Manufacturing Systems using advanced computing: Virtual Reality, discrete event simulation, Artificial Intelligence.
- Computer Integrated Manufacturing: discrete event controllers, scheduling, tele-monitoring, data interfaces.
- Manufacturing automation: CNC path optimization, intelligent interactive programming of robots, smart machine tool controllers.
- Metrology and compensation of machine tool errors.
- Rapid and custom manufacturing: laser-based RM, rapid casting, reverse engineering.