Email: icrc@uwo.ca
The professional skills workshops are selected from existing Engineering Graduate courses currently offered through the Thompson Chair Program in Western Engineering (Meister). These courses, developed and delivered in collaboration with the Ivey Business School, include Business Acumen, Commercialization and New Venture Creation. This formal training is to be completed prior to the trainees undertaking their internship period so that these skills may be practiced in that environment. Beyond the evaluation of the formal training, FPC staff, industry partners, faculty members and peers will assess trainee performance in these skill areas during the internship, at the Annual Workshop and Symposium, and during their graduate training, providing added value to ICRC trainees. Through Western’s partnership with COMPLETE (a consortium of North American Engineering Leadership programs) and industry partners, we will develop assessment tools that allow HQP to receive specific advice on their individual and team professional skills.
ICRC faculty members have collaborated to develop four technical course modules that represent the base knowledge required to appreciate the material-process-structure-property interactions inherent in the manufacture of CoDiCoFRP materials. These course modules carries a weight of 0.25 graduate credits (i.e. ½ of a one-semester course) representing 13 contact hours with the instructor and will be open to non-ICRC CREATE students. Comprised of classroom and hands-on laboratory exercises, the primary goal is to ensure that all ICRC students, regardless of their area of research focus, can appreciate the results of their colleagues along the value-chain. ICRC trainees should, ideally, complete the first two modules prior to their FPC/Industry internship. The specific learning objectives of the Value-Chain courses are:
ICRC trainees may be required to complete additional courses to satisfy the degree requirements of their home institution. Relevant courses offered at participating ICRC institutions include Composite Materials (Kuboki), Advances in Polymer Materials (Thompson), Fracture Mechanics (Wood), Statistical Mechanics (Denniston), Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics (Denniston), Scientific Computing (Denniston), FE methods for impact and crashworthiness analyses (Altenhof), Manufacturing Systems Simulation (Urbanic), Computer Integrated Manufacturing (Urbanic), Computer Aided Machining and Measurements (Urbanic), Advanced Statistical Process Analysis (Hrymak), Introduction to Polymer Processing (Thompson), Polymer Extrusion (Thompson), Topics in Vehicle Testing (Johrendt), Neural Network Applications in Mechanical Engineering (Johrendt), and Composite Processing (Henning), Processing Simulation of Composites (Hubert). By prior agreement, graduate courses at any Ontario institution are approved for credit at any other Ontario institution.
All ICRC CREATE trainees are guaranteed a 4-month internship at either the Fraunhofer Project Centre or with a suitable industrial partner. Interns at FPC will take part in the day-to-day operations of the Centre. Their duties will include assisting in the preparation, execution and follow-up associated with molding trials conducted at the Centre, material characterization activities in support of these trials, and may also include aspects of ancillary process and equipment development as needs arise. As part of their professional training, interns will be assembled into multi-disciplinary teams comprised of interns, visiting graduate students, FPC staff and industry collaborators with each intern being assigned primary responsibility for one aspect of a short-term (e.g. 2 month) industrial project. Typical trainee responsibilities might include the completion of a literature survey, proposing the design of an equipment or process modification, or proposing and/or executing an experimental investigation into some aspect of the manufacturing process. These projects will provide a formal mechanism to ensure that students gain an understanding of the interactions between materials, processing, simulation and design in a real product development environment and an opportunity to exercise their leadership, presentation and project management skills. Internships with industry partners will be vetted by the Academic Committee to ensure comparable experience and assessment opportunities exist. Current industry partners of ICRC research projects include automotive OEMs, Tier suppliers, material suppliers and process equipment manufacturers. Furthermore, based on close cooperation with the Industrial Advisory Board of the KIT institutes, German industry internships will be organized for the very best of the Canadian PhD students.
All students and faculty associated with the International Graduate School for CoDiCoFRP materials will attend the annual IGS Research Symposium and Workshop. The 4-day symposium and 5-day workshop will alternate between Germany and Canada. The program of the symposium will be designed to attract international academic and industrial researchers as well as leaders in the field of polymer composite materials. In conjunction with the annual symposium, invited scholars and industry researchers will deliver focused, short courses on topics relevant to the training of students and industry during the workshop. In the first year, we will use the workshop to deliver the first Value-Chain course and the Business Acumen module described above. The Symposium will also incorporate sessions from industry leaders on the importance and development of professional skills. This annual meeting will also facilitate the face-to-face meetings of the national and international committees responsible for managing the IGS.
All ICRC trainees will work on research topics with direct links to industrially relevant problems and will be required to present their results to expert and non-expert audiences. Joint supervision by ICRC and KIT faculty members is mandatory for Canadian and German PhD students and Canadian Masters students in the program. The choice of the international co-supervisor is based on providing complimentary competencies to support the breadth and depth of the trainee’s research topic. Degree progression requirements will remain the jurisdiction of the trainee’s home institution.
Following a minimum of one year of study at their home institution, (i.e. successful completion of their Comprehensive Examination(s)), PhD students in the program will spend up to 4 months with their international co-supervisor at KIT. During their visits, the ICRC trainees will be fully integrated in the activities of the IRTG such as lectures, seminars, and milestone workshops and have access to Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology (F-ICT) and Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (F-IWM), two leading research institutions in processing, characterization, simulation and assessment of fiber-reinforced polymer composites. The trainees will have permanent, full access to the German lectures and seminars via the web (all presented in English) and online platform of the IRTG. Thus continuous interaction with the German team is ensured before and after the research exchanges. In a reciprocal agreement, PhD students at KIT will also spend up to 4 months at a partner institution within the ICRC. These exchanges significantly contribute to the close linkage of the research of the students in Canada and at KIT, even outside of the visiting schedules.
