PhD or MSc study - stainless steel rigging failure

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As a professional in this field, engineering failure diagnosis, I fully agree with you. I take a keen interest in failures of every type but, as a keen yachtsman, I am particularly interested in those that occur on boats. I have yet to see a rigging failure whose diagnosis was not immediately obvious, although the initiator may take a little longer to discover. I cannot see the subject having sufficient meat in it for a PhD thesis, apart from the requirement for it to be original research.
 
[ QUOTE ]
I cannot see the subject having sufficient meat in it for a PhD thesis, apart from the requirement for it to be original research.

[/ QUOTE ]How about an MSc project?
 
I'm an academic at the University of Southampton... I doubt it's a PhD either, perhaps an MSc or, if funded, an academic in Engineering (or we have Ship Science here) might be interested. Try these guys HERE
 
Yes, I would guess an MSc project could be appropriate. One of the big problems I see is obtaining sufficient examples of different failures to fill out the project. There are several failures on the Internet but most I'm aware of have already been diagnosed. The only solution would seem to be to generate your own. So it looks like the project would involve lots of sailing. Perhaps I'll go for it!
 
How about interesting a senior lecturer - maybe a yachtie - at one of the appropriate universities. He/she could put a proposal together maybe with input from this forum and, over a period of months, get references, details and samples of failed components that the student might like to include. Provided that insurers, surveyors, riggers and the yachting forums (i.e. here) know that the study is going to start and end at certain times, the student could get a lot of support.

I cannot believe that anyone in the industry want to see rig failures in service....it is a big issue. Ideally we would identify a test procedure or new piece of kit that would allow perfectly good rigging to stay in service yet identify risky rigging that needs to be replaced. Of course, sometimes new rigging is dangerous so age is not the only criterion.
 
What is missing is loading data.
Its no good knowing how the material behaves & fails if you dont really know what loads it will be subjected to during the lifetime.
There have been very few studies indeed to measure the rigging loads (and by that I mean real time over many months/ years which is what is needed due to the statistical nature of the thing), especially, of course, on anything but full on racing machines (and they keep it to themselves too).

Do you have funding available & would you be willing to let an MSc student instrument your boat? /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
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