Engineering an international workshop success

The ‘International Workshop on Integrated Computational Materials Engineering’ was held on 18 and 23 July and attracted a combined audience of 254 attendees, with at least 20% attending coming from industry.

Bernard Rolfe is Professor of Advanced Manufacturing (Mechanical Engineering) in Deakin University’s School of Engineering and is Director of 3DEC – the Deakin Digital Design and Engineering Centre. He is also a member of the Deakin - IIT Madras - IIT Hyderabad CoE-AMM.

‘This was a great example of how even in this COVID-19 crisis interesting global workshops can run,’ Professor Rolfe says.

It was the third workshop to be hosted by the Centre, which is an initiative involving Deakin’s Institute for Frontier Materials and School of Engineering, together with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and IIT Hyderabad.

‘Deakin has a long history of collaborating with IIT Madras, and five years ago Deakin and IIT Madras agreed to a joint cotutelle research student program,’ Professor Rolfe explains. ‘This transformed into a Centre of Excellence in Advanced Materials and Manufacturing in 2018, with Deakin’s Institute for Frontier Materials and School of Engineering both part of the initiative.’

The first workshop hosted by the Centre was in 2018 on Advanced Materials and Manufacturing, followed by a second successful workshop in 2019 on Lightweighting, with both workshops held in Chennai.

‘The success of the workshops has come from bringing together some of the best professors with leaders in industry to provide new students, academics, and the industrial community a discussion of where we could go together,’ Professor Rolfe says.

It was intended for the third workshop to be held in March 2020 in Hyderabad to celebrate IIT Hyderabad joining as the new third member of CoE-AMM. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted these plans, Professor Rolfe says the move was made to take the workshop online, led by the Centre’s Chief Manager Dr Anand Krishnamurthy.

There were four sessions in the workshop: Computational Alloy Design, Process Microstructure Prediction tools, Microstructure Property-Lifing Prediction, and Tools Deployment, with speakers from both industry and academia. Alfred Deakin Professor Peter Hodgson from the Institute for Frontier Materials spoke about Machine Learning to assist in the development of new high-entropy alloys. Professor Rolfe discussed sheet metal forming and also chaired a session. He says the benefits of the workshop reach further than the actual sessions.

‘This workshop has strengthened Deakin’s research collaboration with India, while increasing our involvement with industry – such as GE, Tata Steel, Renault, and Volvo Trucks.'