Fulltime, two year trainee position at the PDEng program 'Smart Buildings & Cities' of the Eindhoven University of Technology. We are looking for candidates with a strong interest in the built environment and an MSc degree in Civil or Building Engineering, Building Science, Mechanical Engineering, Architectural Engineering, or equivalent. Affinity with the design of steel and/or concrete bridge and viaduct structures for strength, stability and fatigue in relation to sustainability and circularity (Life Cycle Analysis and Life Cycle Costing) is essential.
Smart Buildings & Cities PDEng programThe Smart Buildings & Cities PDEng program wants to contribute to the transition towards smart, intelligent and sustainable cities where quality of life is high. This transition requires new solutions which can only be created through multiscale and transdisciplinary (design) approaches. This requires technical designers who are able to work in a multidisciplinary environment and know how to communicate with different disciplines and stake holders. This PDEng program educates trainees to become those technical designers! Please note that this program is about technological design, i.e., the process of solving problems by means of a technological design, this in contrast to (PhD) research, which is the process of understanding problems.
After the two year program our trainees become technical designers with a broad technological understanding of the disciplines relevant to the above mentioned smart cities themes (architecture, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, building physics and services and ICT), who excel in their own discipline and who are able to work in multidisciplinary design teams, contribute to design issues outside their own core disciplines, integrate different technologies into new products and concepts, and who understand the commercial aspects of these innovative products and concepts.
Job descriptionThe Department of the Built Environment of the Eindhoven University of Technology offers you a trainee position to follow a two-year post-master technological designer program, which leads to the degree of 'Professional Doctorate in Engineering' (PDEng). The program consists of two main parts running in parallel:
- Half of the program consists of post-master level education in the form of generic design projects and courses about design methods, entrepreneurship and professional skills. Furthermore, it includes several technical courses about topics relevant to SB&C. This part of the program also offers ample opportunity to develop professional skills.
- The other half of the program is dedicated to an individual design project in collaboration with a company. It is the trainee's main responsibility to manage and execute the project. Each trainee is supported by an advisor from the company and an advisor from the university. A business plan for implementation or marketing of the designed product or process is part of the final deliverables.
The company design project related to this traineeship is described below.
The company (Rijkswaterstaat, RWS) assignment is to quantify the effect of different design working lives on the design of steel and concrete bridges and viaducts. The goal is to achieve a better agreement between the design working life of bridges and viaducts on the one hand and their technical and functional life on the other hand. Conceptual and structural designs for bridges with characteristic spans will be developed for various design working lives, considering technical, economical and functional scenarios, and assess their effect on the global bridge design. Emphasis is on the investigation how different design working lives may result in different types of structures as compared to the current state-of-the-art.
The PDEng trainee will be embedded in the research group Steel and Aluminium Structures of the research program Structural Engineering and Design -
https://www.tue.nl/en/research/research-groups/structural-engineering-and-design/. For questions about the project contact
prof. ir. H.H. (Bert) Snijder or
prof. dr. ir. J. (Johan) Maljaars.