Innovation in product design and manufacturing has become a major driver for industrial competitiveness and profitability in recent years. As enabling technologies become more easily accessible, engineers are faced with increasing demands for designing and producing more complex mechanical devices to serve the needs of the society. Next generation engineering products will be ‘smart’ with many functionalities; they will be made of new materials; they will increase energy efficiency and reduce environmental impact; they will vary in size from nano to mega scales; and they will be more closely integrated with information processing systems. Also as mechanical systems are becoming increasingly complex to analyse and expensive to experiment, more emphasis will have to be placed on computer aided analysis, design, verification and manufacturing. Our research program in mechanical engineering responds to these trends and focuses on basic research related to materials science and process engineering, product design, and information integrated manufacturing processes. In doing so applications to different physical processes are studied (e.g. energy systems, bioengineering, metal forming, polymer processing, discrete part manufacturing to name a few).
Students can apply to the Ph.D. programs with a B.S. or M.S. degree. The Ph.D. degree requires successful completion of 14 courses within 3 years and take the Qualifying Examination within 7th semester at latest beyond the B.S. degree and 7 courses within 2 years and take the Qualifying Examination within 5th semester at latest beyond the M.S. degree. In addition to the credit courses, students must complete the non-credit courses; ; KOLT 500: KOLT Graduate Teaching Assistant Training, MECH 590: Seminar, ENGL 500: Academic Writing, ETHR 500: Scientific Research Methods and Research and Publication Ethics, TEAC 500: Teaching Experience and MECH 695: PhD Thesis Course.
REGULATIONS FOR PhD QUALIFIER EXAM IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING