Mr Janaka Bandara Rajapaksha

MSc (Research) Advanced Mechanical Engineering - University of Sheffield UK

Doctoral Candidate - Doctor of Philosophy

In: Mechanical Engineering » Faculty of Engineering

Biography

After been awarded with a BSc (Honours) in Mechanical Engineering in 2008, from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, I was recruited by the prestigious De La Rue Security and Currency print Ltd. as the Process Improvement Engineer for their Sri Lankan facility.

I, then, left De La Rue to enrol at the University of Sheffield, UK, as a postgraduate student on their Advanced Mechanical Engineering - Research program. I went on to complete the programme and was awarded a MSc (Research) in Advanced Mechanical Engineering with a Distinction by Department of Mechanical Engineering of the university.

Subsequently, I was offered a position with the university as a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) associate, on a knowledge transfer project that was in operation at the time between the university and a small sized enterprise. At this role, in addition for my main responsibility of product development, working on prototype to product conversion, budget management and project management, I also contributed through formalising a final year project (as a subtask of the main project) and being the industrial supervisor of the student, performing market research, supplier identification and applying for pertinent grants.

Thereafter, I joined Technical Services Division (TSD) of TEi ltd UK, an engineering construction company which is predominantly involved in power and petro chemical industries within UK. With TEi, I managed to develop my skills and knowledge on the engineering, maintenance, construction and procurement aspects of heavy mechanical engineering, main focus being on high pressure, high temperature steam raising and transportation equipment and systems. Moreover, as a Site Mechanical Engineer, I was responsible for overall progress (health & safety, budgets, planning and resources) and effective completion of routine and non-routine tasks, sub-projects and projects.

Then, I joined Asset Integrity Management division of Doosan Babcock (DB), a world leading and a specialist company catering to the Oil & Gas, Petrochem, Conventional Power, Nuclear and Renewable energy industries as a Project Engineer. With DB I worked on a spectrum of projects within asset integrity management (AIM) on which I carried out risk based inspections (RBI), condition monitoring (CM), Non Destructive Examination techniques (NDE/ND Testing) specification, condition based assessments for maintenance (CBM), remenant life assessments, defect tolerability assessments, FMEA and reliability improvement projects.

Furthermore, I was responsible for project related tasks such as proposals, estimation, client interactions, budget management and resource management. In addition, I was the project manager for a technical services agreement between DB and a UK based power operator.

Just before I came back to academia as a doctoral researcher, I was working as the Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) Liaison Lead on a biomass conversion project with DB. It was the observations I made while working on this role and research I carried out in order to create systems to facilitate the immediate and wider project groups that have partially encouraged and motivated me to seek a research group which is contributing to the pertinent field of Engineering Management, especially mitigation of impact of an engineering change on project deliverables.

Furthermore, I have full membership with IMechE UK, hence, possessing the Chartered Engineer status with the Engineering Council UK.