Dmitrii Sergachev

Background

About Dmitrii Sergachev

Research, programming, and mechanical design. I find these three activities equally compelling and wish to further improve them in my workflow. They are comprised of different tasks, yet they share a common feature. All of them encourage creative solutions but provide objective evaluation criteria. The first allows me to be inventive while the latter mitigates my strive to perfection. Mechanical engineering is my foundation. I started career, working on wear prevention and recovery of various machines. I was thrilled each time we had a new system to diagnose, whether it was a common car, an enormous marine engine, or an industrial steel rolling equipment. As I gained experience with machinery I decided to dive deeper into friction and wear mechanisms. Nonetheless, the obtained knowledge helped me tremendously in negotiations with industrial partners, design of laboratory setups and 3d-printing. Research and analysis are my focus. I built my PhD research on surface micro-texturing upon an idea proposed on the first interview. The validity of the approach was initially confirmed analytically and then verified through a set of experiments. I developed a multi-scale contact model and performed BEM and FEM simulations to predict frictional behaviour based on texture dimensions. Leading one of the project packages, I further optimised the texture designs for an industrial hot-embossing production. During the research I happily shared results on a conference, gave lectures and helped with master students supervision. Programming is my multi-tool, which accompanies me from high school. My first project was a model of the Solar system programmed in ActionScript for the International Space Olympics, where I reached semi-finals. Later I worked on small projects in Basic, Fortran, HTML/CSS, VBScript, C++. During my master’s study I learned LabView and built a data acquisition system for a reciprocating tribometer to remove the limitations imposed by a deprecated DOS software. For the duration of the PhD research MATLAB became my main tool to perform modelling and simulations. Nowadays, I am improving my Python skills for data collection, processing, and analysis, as well as application development for hobby projects. My hobbies usually tend to balance out the trio. I have a list of pet projects from which I choose what to work on during a weekend. It ranges from software to mechanical and interior design, so I am gradually building my own workshop. And of course, there is always a pair of climbing shoes and a trusty guitar for an intermission.