12th Annual PhD Workshop PhD Study of Mechanical Engineering, Naval Architecture, Aeronautical Engineering and Metallurgical Engineering; Book of Abstracts

This booklet contains abstracts presented at the 12th Annual FAMENA PhD Workshop held at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Zagreb, on September 14, 2026. The annual PhD workshop is an integral part of the PhD program in Mechanical Engineering, Naval Architecture, Aeronautical Engineering, and Metallurgical Engineering, The workshop/conference is aimed to provide forum for exchange of ideas among PhD students, to help students to strengthen their presentation skills and to provide a platform to initiate new scientific collaborations.
Contributions in this booklet are divided into two broad groups, abstracts of preliminary PhD topics and abstracts of final PhD topics. Former are mostly presented by the first year PhD candidates, while latter are presented by PhD students of second and higher years. Abstracts are structured in a way to encourage students to write clearly and concisely purposes of their PhD theses, with the goal to bring their research closer to the wide community and even to those who are not specialists in the field. This booklet could be a valuable and relevant reference for PhD students and their mentors as it represents kind of a milestone in the progress of their PhDs. It will also be useful for all stakeholders of PhD education to evaluate quality and progress of PhD theses. Finally, it can be useful for the industry in both Croatia and Slovenia as it contains in one place many of the research efforts from the involved faculties.
In total, there were 36 presentations on the PhD Workshop. 26 participants presented preliminary topics of their theses, while 10 participants presented final PhD topics.
Contributions collected in the booklet of abstracts are from different modules of the PhD study: Process and Energy Engineering (11 contributions), Computational Mechanics (2), Theory of Structures (2), Mechatronics and Robotics (7), Industrial Engineering and Management (1), Scientific Metrology in Mechanical Engineering (1), Aeronautical Engineering (3), Materials Engineering (3), Advanced Production Technologies (4), Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering (1) and Metallurgical Engineering (1). Diversity of these topics clearly indicates broad and rich research interests and activities at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture and Faculty of Metallurgy.