Research Assistant/Associate (f/m/d) - ESR fellow within the Marie Sklodowska-Curie project xCTing

We are looking for a Research Assistant/Associate (f/m/d) joining our interdisciplinary and motivated team. 

The research group Industrial Tomography and the team of WZL's measuring room work on further innovation in industrial X-ray Computed Tomography (xCT) and its application in highly relevant industry sectors, e.g. battery production or additive manufacturing. The high extent of academic and industrial collaboration in this field over the recent years manifests the research group's expertise.

About the Project xCTing

First-time-right and zero-defect manufacturing of customized lot-size-one products are essential elements of the Industry 4.0 paradigm shift to reinforce Europe's global leadership in manufacturing. X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) metrology has a key role to play in this transition, since it is the only known technology that can certify nondestructively the quality of internal complex structures, such as those produced by additive manufacturing or found in assemblies.

However, CT largely remains an off-line technology, due to the unsolved trade-off between scan speed and scan quality, and the need for extensive expert user input. xCTing will therefore focus on significantly increasing autonomy, robustness and speed in CT metrology in order to support its transition towards a fully in-line quality assurance technology as required in Industry 4.0 environments. Meeting these challenges requires the integration of a broad range of interdisciplinary expertise, including physics, manufacturing, dimensional metrology, machine learning, as well as efficient and reliable big data analytics and visualization.

In order to achieve the envisaged innovation breakthrough in the European industry, Europe is in dire need of innovators who can combine this variety of competences with entrepreneurial skills. The xCTing project is a pan-European industrial-academic initiative committed to provide the unique and encompassing training environment required to foster this new generation of innovation-minded research engineers, that will act as catalysts in the further transformation of Europe's manufacturing industry towards global technological leadership. The overall aim of the xCTing project is to train 15 promising researchers (ESRs) that will take the lead in conceiving the next generation of European Industry 4.0-ready CT technology. The xCTing consortium consists of 9 beneficiaries and 6 partner organisations.

xCTing is a European Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network, funded by the European Union within the Horizon 2020 framework.

Your involvement as Research Assistant/Associate (f/m/d) - ESR fellow will be focused on the sub-project «Autonomous adaption of CT acquisition parameters». The main objective is to develop a model to automatically optimize exposure parameters to reduce dimensional measurement uncertainty and increase defect detection probability. In function of dimensional measurement uncertainty, defect detection probability and region of interest, the model will determine the optimal combination of tube voltage, tube current, exposure time per projection, workpiece orientation for conventional CT scanning geometries, and then expand the work towards non-conventional fast and adaptive CT scanning geometries to fit in with the work performed by other researchers in the project. The initial model will be developed based on simulated data, and then validated in experimental conditions using calibrated work pieces. The expected result is a validated model to determine the optimal set of exposure parameters that can be applied to any given work piece, including for nonconventional CT acquisition geometries.

The research group has extensive prior experience with modelling CT acquisition parameters. Using state-of-the-art simulation and image processing techniques, it is considered feasible to not only include the full set of available exposure parameters (incl. the scanning geometry) in a single model, but to do this in a task-specific manner.

As a Research Assistant/Associate (f/m/d) - ESR fellow, you are expected to pursue a PhD within your focus project. Therefore this job offer includes a PhD opportunity. Moreover, within the framework of the xCTing project you will benefit from regular multi-competence training weeks fostering your personal and academic development.