Paul Young

Biography

Dr Paul Young completed his bachelor degree in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering (BA.BAI.) in Dublin University graduating with a 1st class honours in 1986. He was awarded his PhD for his thesis on the High Frequency Monitoring of Cutting Vibrations under the supervision of Prof Henry Rice and Prof John Fitzpatrick in 1991 by Dublin University. From 1991 to 1995 he worked as a project engineer for ESTECH Corp., a Computer Aided Engineering consultancy which was a joint venture between NISSAN and SDRC. For the most part projects dealt with the testing, analysis and modelling of vehicles for the purposes of reducing noise and vibration, but also took in parts reliability and development of software systems to automate modelling. Returning to Ireland in 1995, he joined the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in University College Dublin under Prof. Gerry Byrne. Working on EU projects (NEMPRO and COMPRO) looking at the simulation and monitoring of cutting processes he also managed a number of locally funded development projects with Irish industry. After being appointed as a lecturer in DCU in 1998, the research focus changed to that of modelling and analysing manufacturing systems and processes. This led to collaboration over a number of years with INTEL Ireland, the ICMR (now Irish Manufacturing Research) and European projects as Principal Investigator.

Research Expertise

The general focus of Paul’s research is on the use of data and modelling to develop a fundamental understanding of an engineering problem so that optimisation may be used to improve the performance of the system. Having applied this to the use of vibration signals from the turning process for his PhD work, he worked in the automotive industry in Japan improving vehicle Noise, Vibration and Harshness for four years. Returning to Ireland and manufacturing, his research looked at the area of tool condition monitoring for detection of tool breakage and surface quality in collaboration with manufacturers like BOSCH, Scania, Sandvik, ARTIS and BMW before expanding from an individual process to the manufacturing system itself . This led to collaboration with high volume manufacturers like INTEL, Infineon, Seagate and Boston Scientific. While working on individual modelling to solve particular problem statements, the development data driven modelling approaches were the important contribution in this field. More recently, he has worked on the development of a novel electric vehicle design taking advantage of modern fabrication processes to enable a start-up company to build the vehicle without the need for expensive jigs and fixtures has been fruitful in the creation of jobs. He is also collaborating with Irish Manufacturing Research, looking at the use of collaborative robotics in manufacturing, and have expertise in 3-D modelling and printing.