About

About the website - Ostpoller

Ostpoller is a website with posts and articles around programming and software design mostly for my own usage and reference. Maybe, somebody else finds it useful …

About me - Philipp WESTPHAL

I am a structural/mechanical engineer living and working in the greater area of Hamburg, Germany.
Also, I am a self-taught programmer and software developer, merging those skill sets as much as possible in my daily work as an (structural) stress engineer at Airbus.

When I am not performing (numerical) assembly simulation for aircraft structure components, I am developing a microservice-based environment to host usefull engineering services mostly related, but not limited, to airframe structures.

Professional Career

After school and mandatory civil service in 1995, I followed an 2.5 year apprenticeship to qualify as a professional boatbuilder at Rathje Werft, Kiel-Friedrichsort, Germany.

In 1998, after working for a few months as a boatbuilder, I moved to Southampton, UK, and studied Yacht & Powercraft Design at the Southampton Institute of Higher Education, nowadays Solent University, from where I graduated 3 years later with a 1st Class Honours Degree in Bachelor of Engineering.

During the first 5 years after university, I worked as a structural designer and analyst for a UK-based company in Southampton producing Epoxy resins and pre-preg materials for the marine and wind energy market, SP Systems/SP Technologies, nowadays Gurit. My tasks were focused on designing, analysing and supervising the construction of the load-carrying structure of large and high performance sailing craft. This included

During my time at SP Technologies (2001-2006), I was seconded to Australia (Sydney, Northern Beaches) for one year to contribute in the hiring and training of local engineers for the company’s branch in Australia.

Joining Airbus in Hamburg, Germany, in 2006, I participated in

  • the resarch for industrial use of composite materials in the construction of large civil aircraft,
  • the specific design work (sizing and certification) of primary structures for the composite aircraft A350,
  • the development of structure analysis tools for sizing and for certification purposes.

Today at Airbus, most of my effort is concentrated on

  • the (numerical, finite element based) simulation of manufacturing processes (mostly assembly),
  • the continuous effort to digital transformation (development of a microservice-based environment).

Interests

I do some basic electronic tinkering as well as setting up and maintaining my home network, private cloud server, various single-board-computer projects and Python coding projects. I currently dip my toes into low-level C programming.
I like to go cycling and hiking in the great outdoors.

Contact

  • philipp dot westphal at gmx dot net

Disclaimer

I take no responsibility for the content of external links. For the content of the linked pages, their operators are responsible, exclusively.