Hi Everyone,

I am interested to pursue PhD in field related to -

1. measurement
2. calibration

or any related to the above as my work allows me to have all the tools to help other solve problems related to the above.

My problem are as the following though :

1. i don't know what problems out there need solving (i mean specific problems). do you know where i can find them?
2. do we find the research topic first then find the advisors? or should i do the opposite?

i found one Prof who is interested to take me in, but he wants full time & its in Australia - is there anything close to home?

appreciate your thoughts. thanks a lot :-)

It seems you want to get a PhD in Instrumentation Engineering.

Because you are good at measurement, perhaps you'd like to consider doing a research on the observability of systems. The system is said to be completely observable if every State x(t) can be determined from the observation of Output y(t) over a finite time interval, Δt. The concept of observability is useful in solving the problem of reconstructing unmeasurable State variables from measurable output variables in the minimum possible length of time.

Therefore, the research topic is about the Optimal Estimation of Non-measurable Variables in <insert application> dynamic systems. The concept of observability is very important because, in practice, the difficulty encountered with feedback control is that some of the State variables are not accessible for direct measurement, with the result that it becomes necessary to estimate the unmeasurable input variables in order to construct the desired control signals. Get a book on Kalman Filter maybe a good read for you.



This post has been edited by Critical_Fallacy: Nov 26 2013, 03:00 PM

If you insist to be specific, well, there are several applications you can try: Hard Disk Drive, Inverted Pendulum, Distillation Column, Flexible-Link Manipulator, Quad Tilt-Rotor Aerodynamic System, Self-balancing Two-wheel Mobile Robot.

Library.

thank you so much. i will start researching on the above-mentioned keywords :-)