HI,
This week was not a very fruitful week for my phd work. but still manage to skim through some journal paper. For this first posting i guess i should briefly explain what my phd is all about. I am currently a registered student of a Phd program at the University of Malaya, Engineering Faculty in which i am also a faculty member. The research that i am currently doing is related to the environment specifically design for the environment which is a relatively new research area in Malaysia. Why do i choose this area? Well i have always wanted to be environmentalist and also help save the world in some way so this area would be a good oppurtunity for me to be just that. So i know what area i want to work but this is such a big area that i need to have some focus area to zoom in. Thats when this Phd work starts being difficult. the more you read the more you think that every possible thing that need to be researched have been researched. so i really need to find a niche where i could put my mark and in an area where others in the world are 5-10 years ahead i do need to find this niche area fast. till now i have looked into various angles that i can pursue but most are very shaky to be a phd work. but yesterday i did found something intersting the. my supervisor (which is not really fimiliar in design for environment)suggested me to look into ways of producing design for disassembly evaluation method. At first i thought it would be a futile direction as i know from my readings this area is already saturated and people have developed dfd methods for quite a while already. but none the less i did some search. i found that most dfd are based on time studies to indicate difficulty of disassembly but NEC had previously did a study on developing evaluation method based on quantification of disassembly energy to determine disassembly difficulty which is somewhat different. i will try to work on this path to see if there is future in it. Hopefully by next week i would be able to produce a concept paper for this path.
