Bárbara Arizmendi

I was born in Madrid in 1992 where I completed my degree in Energy Engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. My favourite subjects were thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. After, I moved to Glasgow to complete my Masters in Advanced Mechanical Engineering at Strathclyde University. I spent the last 3 years in this charming city and I was really fascinated about its heritage and the friendliness of its people.

My career has been focused in robustly building technical skills to be delivered to industrial partners and increase their capabilities. The last year of my degree I had the opportunity to undertake a placement in a renowned Spanish power company. During that time, I acquired skills in user CFD modelling and I applied those on the analysis of the design of the nuclear waste storage cooled by free convection which was successfully validated analytically. The CFD modelling skills and understanding I obtained were delivered to the company and CFD has been used as a valid analysis tool since then up to today. This piece of work was presented as my degree thesis obtaining an honour qualification.

After completing my Masters in Advanced Mechanical Engineering, I was selected for a knowledge transfer programme (KTP) from Innovate UK. The specific goal of my project was to embed CFD surrogate based optimisation skills into the design capabilities of a business partner. Consequently, I developed my skills in this topic by working closely with the department of Mechanical and Aerospace from the University of Strathclyde, by researching and by attending training courses and conferences. The knowledge acquired was implemented for the design optimisation of temperature sensitive components cooled by forced convection to demonstrate the capabilities of the approach. For the delivery of the capabilities, I integrated a surrogate based optimisation algorithm with the CAD and CFD software to build an automatic CFD design optimisation tool to minimise the background knowledge required for the engineers from the company to succeed in optimising their designs. Based on this project, I will be completing soon a Masters of Philosophy in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering by the University of Strathclyde and, I presented the work in the EUROGEN conference 2017. In addition, I was awarded during the project with a management and leadership by the Chartered Management Institute from UK.

Since the KTP project finished in October 2017, I applied for UTOPIAE project because I was seeking for new technical challenges and after working to complete my MPhil I was keen on continuing my research activity and pursuing a PhD. In addition, I like having the chance of industrial collaborations which will open opportunities for the future career. I think I am a good fit for this project because I am a hardworking person and very passionate about what I do and because embrace the challenges and I enjoy learning new concepts and skills.

One of my hobbies is sports: I played basketball for 15 years but now I devote my time to jogging, cycling, fitness classes and I play squash or tennis as well. I run the Great Scottish run in 2016 and 2017 which is a half marathon and planning to run it next year. I also like volunteering activities: last year I collaborated in the project Friends Connect from Down Syndrome Scotland and I had to arrange and attend meetings and activities for people with Down Syndrome. I enjoy listening to good live music and socialise with friends.