Simone Weber

Why did you choose Cranfield?

My name is Simone Weber and I’m seconded from Airbus Helicopters UK to do a PhD at Cranfield University. I just started my third year of my PhD and while I do my PhD I’m also Technology Integration Manager combining all the technical work we do within this project together.

I never had a plan in my head of doing a PhD and I never dreamt about leading a project in a technical sense like this. But it’s more sometimes the frustration of getting things done properly, making a change to society and that’s really what has driven me.

After two years of working as a mechanical design engineer I really felt like I wanted to go back into what I learned during my studies and do research, so I thought ‘why not do a PhD?’ and that’s why, with the help of Cranfield University and of course with Airbus Helicopters, we managed to set up a project which I can base my PhD on.

A friend of mine suggested Cranfield University, because they are great within Aerospace and working with industry, and therefore I contacted one of my now-supervisors and everyone was really enthusiastic.

The great thing about convincing Airbus Helicopters UK to sponsor the project is that they were really excited about doing it and they really pushed for it and, to be honest, without their support it wouldn’t have been possible to do my PhD or this project BLADESENSE.

What was Cranfield's impact

Within the project BLADESENSE we try to monitor the blade behavior during flight using a fibre-optic instrumentation system, which will be developed by Cranfield University photonics team. We have BHR Group and Helitune involved and Airbus Helicopters is the lead partner. The reason why we want to do this is because we want to identify the blade behavior during flight.

Now having the fibre-optic sensors mounted on the rotor blades it’s very important to know where exactly to mount them- is it a straight line or is it a zigzag line to predict the blade behaviour as accurately as possible. Now this is where my PHD comes in, which is very interesting also in terms of looking at all of the partners aspects, and to bring the technology together. 

If this project is successful it will be the first time that we are able to collect data during flight from the rotor blade – this will be a great impact for maintenance, rotor blade design or even  updating flight control systems using real-life data from the fibre-optic sensors.