Professor Carl Howard

Professor Carl Howard
 Position Professor
 Org Unit Mechanical Engineering
 Email carl.howard@adelaide.edu.au
 Telephone +61 8 8313 3469
 Location Floor/Room 2 ,  Engineering South ,   North Terrace
  • Teaching Interests

    Subjects Taught

    Topics of Interest Relating to Learning and Teaching

    • Clicker style apps for increasing student participation and feedback, such as socrative.com
    • MapleTA for online assessment and feedback
    • Remote laboratories
    • Total financial cost of teaching delivery
    • Marketing (promotion) of courses
    • Methods of evaluating retention of content
    • Novel lecture formats for technical engineering subjects, especially large (200+) class sizes
    • Examples of flipped classrooms that actually work for technical engineering subjects
    • Scalable assessment methods for large class sizes
    • Adaptive teaching and learning
    • Online learning and MOOCs
    • First Learn On Paper (FLOP teaching style)
    • Quality assurance for courses
    • Research Skills Develoment Framework for HDR students and methods to actively develop these skills
    • Methods to create active, life-long learners
    • Collaborative Online Project Management for HDR students and HDR supervisors
    • Gaming for teaching and learning
    • Learning by mistake
    • Edutainment
    • Teaching and learning non-linearly, mozaic learners
    • Next generation meaningful student evaluation of teaching
    • Platforms and apps for learning outside the lecture room, e.g. scavenger hunt game actionbound.com

    For further interest see Research Interests.

  • Research Interests

    Research Interests

    Interested in all matters relating to acoustics and vibration including:

    • thermoacoustics
    • structural vibration
    • condition monitoring
    • ultrasound
    • distributed computing for optimisation
    • passive acoustic and vibration absorbers for noise and vibration control
    • active noise and vibration control
    • kinematics of the human wrist
    • orthopaedic implants

    For further topics of interest, see below.

     Member of the Acoustics, Vibration and Control group.

    PhD Opportunities

    Students interested in contacting me regarding supervision for a PhD degree must have the following pre-requisites:

    • Very good standard of written and spoken English. As a guide, an IELTS score of 7.0.
    • Financial means to support yourself.
      • For domestic students, opportunities exist to apply for APA scholarships and if you have 1st class honours, you are very likely to obtain a scholarship. For domestic students, the tuition fee is covered / waived.
      • For international students, I do not have funds to pay for your scholarship and tuition fees. If you are considering applying for an international scholarship with the University of Adelaide, you would need at least 3 journal papers as first named author in highly ranked journals (e.g. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, Journal of Sound and Vibration, Applied Acoustics, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, etc.), to be shortlisted. The international scholarships are extremely competitive. If you have 1 or 2 journal publications, then you are unlikely to be competitive and should consider increasing the number of journal papers before contacting academics. If you already have an international scholarship, then we would really like to hear from you!
    • An undergraduate or masters degree in mechanical engineering or related field with a reasonable GPA, and have completed subjects relevant to your chosen research topic.

    The research fields that I am interested in supervising include:

    • most topics in acoustics including:
      • active noise and vibration control
      • vibro-acoustics, structural acoustics, sound radiation
      • ultrasound, especially biological applications of ultrasound, such as using ultrasound to kill blue-green algae (cyanobacteria)
      • combustion acoustics
      • acoustic meta-materials
      • acoustic cloaking
      • thermo-acoustics
      • signal processing
      • fast signal processing methods for active control, such as the sliding-Goertzel algorithm, sliding DFT, robust adaptive algorithms
      • statistical energy analysis
      • finite element analysis
      • boundary element analysis
      • acoustic beam-forming
      • psycho-acoustics
      • silencers and mufflers
      • improving transmission loss of panels
      • reducing the noise level inside rocket payload fairings
      • payload fill-factor
      • carbon-nanotube and graphene for improving acoustic absorption of materials
      • outdoor sound propagation models
      • sound radiation from hot jets from exhaust stacks emanating onto communities
      • underwater acoustics and underwater communications
      • sonar and acoustic imaging
      • improving transmission loss of panels
      • cavitation and bubble collapse
      • auralisation
      • spatial audio
      • Head Related Transfer Functions
      • aircraft noise
      • acoustic levitation and material sorting
    • many topics in vibrations including:
      • active vibration control
      • active vibration isolation, and passive vibration isolation
      • vibration condition monitoring of machinery
      • fatigue-life models for bearings
      • decision making
      • structural health monitoring
      • digital image correlator for structural health monitoring
      • vibro-acoustics, including sound radiation from vibrating structures
      • non-linear vibration isolators
      • signal processing methods for practical condition monitoring
      • acoustic and vibration meta-materials
      • vibration black-holes
      • modal analysis
      • structural intensity and power flow
      • vibrational power transmission in structures via rotational moments
      • novel cost-functions for active vibration control and active noise control
    • other topics including:
      • kinematics of the human wrist
      • acoustics and vibrations to improve processing an extraction of minerals and ores
      • drones, UAVs
      • deployable low cost-sensors to create grid arrays
      • low data rate, low power, long range data transmission systems such as DASH7, 6LoWPAN
      • aviation safety
      • head impact, helmet protection, playground surface testing
      • digital signal processors
      • field programmable analog arrays (FPAA) for control problems
      • using waste-heat for refrigeration and air-conditioning, such as thermoacoustics, Vuilleumier heat-pumps, Stirling cycle engines

    If these topics are of interest to you, and you have financial support, then please contact me. When you send me an email please include the following:

    • Your IELTS English score if you are an international student. If you are a domestic student, please indicate this in your email.
    • Confirmation of your means to financially support yourself and cover tuition fees.
    • The research field you are interested in pursuing. If you have not already selected a specific topic, I can suggest some topics.

     

  • Publications

    Journal and conference Publications by Carl Howard can be found on the Acoustics, Vibrations, and Control research group's web site.

    Book: Acoustic Analyses Using MATLAB and ANSYS
    Book: Engineering Noise Control, 5th Edition
  • Professional Associations

  • Professional Interests

    Acoustics, Vibration, Ultrasound, Thermoacoustics and Condition Monitoring, Commercial Aviation, UAVs, Drone

     


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Entry last updated: Thursday, 12 Jan 2023

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