ISSUE 3: SEPTEMBER 2014
MechEngNews MechEngNews
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Contents
Hello!
03 Introducing SELA
Welcome to a new academic year, didn’t that come round fast?
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Once again, we have lots to report here in Mech; of course, we had graduation in July and saw 165 students celebrate their personal success! Our Formula Student team did us proud in SIlverstone, coming in higher than ever before. Our Volaticus team also did tremendously with their human powered flight aircraft down at Lasham airfield. We even have a graduate riding home on his bike... all the way to Malaysia!
Profile Dr Mahmoud Mostafavi
06 Nifty shades of grey 3D printing reaches new levels 07
It’s good to talk Team away days
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Just a quick ride To Malaysia
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Flying High Volaticus spreads its wings
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Where are they now? Carl Naven - BAE Systems
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Congratulations To our 2014 graduates!
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Research focus Tidal Turbines
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Funding awarded This quarter’s grants
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A Blast from the past Hugh Fuller
18 Formula Student Result! 20
Read all about it!
24 The Final Word. A note from the Head of Department
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And new years bring new ventures, so September will see the first intake of students across the Faculty joining SELA (Sheffield Engineering Leadership Academy) as bright new leaders of the future and we can’t wait to see what they have in store for us!
Kat Kat Buck
Editor k.buck@sheffield.ac.uk
Follow us: @SheffMechEng /SheffMechEng SheffMechEng.blogspot.com MechEngNewsThis publication is produced using 100% recycled FSC certified paper
Introducing: SELA
On the last weekend of September, eighteen second year MEng students will head off into the Peak District for an intensive leadership skills bootcamp. The students are members of the Sheffield Engineering Leadership Academy (SELA), an extracurricular program which aims to help our engineering undergraduate students to become engineering leaders of tomorrow, who create positive impact in research and industry. The SELA program consists of a range of activities: skills workshops, industry and research placements, group projects, and a guest lecture series with leaders from academia and industry. This year’s inaugural bootcamp is being delivered by staff from University Student Enterprise (USE) and the students will be joined by mentors from the Faculty of Engineering and industry partners including BAE Systems. SELA’s inaugural cohort were recruited following a fierce competition earlier this year – impressive
applications from seventy candidates were shortlisted to thirty-four, and following interview eighteen first year engineering students were invited to become SELA members. The cohort come from a broad range of engineering subjects across the faculty – mechanical, chemical and biological, civil, electrical, bioengineering, aerospace, and materials science and engineering. The recruitment process for SELA’s second cohort will start in early 2015 around the time of Global Engineering Challenge week. SELA is open to first year undergraduate MEng students (or those on BEng who intend to transfer at the end of their first year).
For further details about SELA visit sela.group.shef.ac.uk or contact Dr Richard France, SELA Manager, r.m.france@sheffield.ac.uk
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Profile: Dr Mahmoud Mostafavi
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I break things for a living!
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Name: Dr Mahmoud Mostafavi Nationality: Iran Graduated: Still learning Specialism: Solid Mechanics Motto: Pay more attention!
What made you want to become a mechanical engineer? Originally I wanted to become a physicist, but then I realised a theory is just a theory until you do an experiment and prove it (or occasionally disprove it). Who designs the experiment and builds the machines to do that? Engineers! So I decided to cut the middleman and learn how to build the machines for the experiments I need myself. You would be interested to know that there are more engineers who work at CERN than physicists. There is a satisfaction in receiving the parts and assembling them to make a machine that you only had in mind. It reminds me of the feeling I got when I was little and opened birthday presents (which, by the way, were always a toy car or train which I would dismantle in 5 minutes to see how they worked!).
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Where did you train? I did my BS and MSc back home in Iran. It takes a bit longer there to do a degree, 4 years BS and 2 years MSc (that is one reason I look old, well that and the fact that I am losing my hair). I then came to the UK to do my PhD at The University of Bristol and after finishing it I went to The University of Manchester as a Research Associate. Then I Joined the Department of Materials Science as a James Martin Fellow at The University of Oxford before Joining the Department here last year. I do not think my training is over. It is extremely interesting to see and helpful to learn from different pools of knowledge at different Universities.
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What are your research interests? I break things for a living! I am interested in knowing what is the cause of materials failure in order to prevent it from happening. We used to over design everything to make sure their structural integrity remains intact in service but with the rising price of raw materials and energy it is becoming more important to design components efficiently. Every aeroplane you fly has lots of cracks, at inspection we find them and leave them there because we know the structure is still safe despite them. It would be a lot more expensive to fly to Spain for tapas if we had to change every component of the plane that has a crack in it, and that is the result of doing research on a material’s failure.
What research are you currently working on? These days I am obsessed with looking inside materials to see how a crack forms, grows and finally causes component failure. We use X-ray imaging in the same way that you would with a CT scan in a hospital if you had a broken bone except that the CT scans we use are three times the size of a football field and the energy is high enough to kill a human. It is called a synchrotron where electrons are accelerated to near the speed of light and because they travel in a ring, they emit high-energy photons that can get through about 10 mm of steel and show us how it breaks inside.
If there was one MechEng problem you could solve, what would it be? If we could build everything out of single crystals, which means no welding, no bolts, no ‌, then we would have a lot fewer cracks and everything would be much safer. But one can only dream.
What words of advice would you give to your student-self about the future? I would tell myself to pay more attention during the mathematics courses so I do not have to sit down and try to re-learn them now.
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Nifty shades of
3D printing is the hot topic at the moment, something we’ve all seen in the news, whether it’s a 3D printed pizza going up into space or 3D printed heart valves. A technique using high speed sintering (HSS) has allowed engineers to produce parts which are lighter and stronger, but researchers from the Department of Mechanical Engineering have discovered a way to make 3D printing even faster and more economical. The new technique prints the ink at different shades of grey which enables them to control the density and strength of the final product. In this manner, the best results are achieved using less ink than is standard. Heading up the research team is Professor Neil Hopkinson. “All HSS work to date has involved printing in 100% black, but this doesn’t get the best results,” Neil explains, “We found that there is a point at which, as the ink levels increase, the mechanical properties start to reduce. This enabled us to identify the ‘sweet spot’ at which you can gain maximum strength with the minimum amount of ink.” The researchers have been able to manipulate the density of the material by up to 40%, opening up the door to the possibility of 3D printing
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parts with differing densities at different points, enabling parts to be greatly reduced in weight, but retain their mechanical strength, for example having a dense outer shell and a lighter inner structure. “Printing in greyscale optimises the material in a process that would be feasible for commercial manufacture. And by making parts with different densities out of one material, we can also make recycling more straightforward.” says Neil. This unique ability to maximise strength while reducing weight lends the technique to obvious applications in the aerospace and automotive industries, but also to more obscure areas such as sports footwear, where soles are currently made from dual density foams Neil predicts that they could, instead, be printed in one material using the new technique. Although the technique is still in development, HSS already holds great promise for industrial use as the process can be scaled back to work at comparable speeds to conventional high volume process, such as injection moulding. The new findings will further reduce the costs of manufacturing using HSS by reducing the volume of ink energy required to make a product.
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It’s good to talk Every now and then our teams like to get together, away from the rigid office environment, to discuss their work and make plans for the year ahead. This summer saw three of our teams heading off into the countryside for a bit of networking and team building to boot. First up was our Academic team away day where 42 of our professors, lecturers and teaching associates joined forces in a wigwam to ‘invent a research project’, discuss how our new engineering building, the Diamond, will affect teaching and hear talks from the newest members of the team. To keep things from getting too serious, the team was sent out with their iPhones over lunch to do a spot of geocaching with a surprise to follow… In each of their ‘caches’ they found various mechanical parts, screws and tools, and on their return they were asked to build something with those parts. 42 academics, tongues out, deep in concentration was a sight to behold and a great example of how academic minds from different fields can come together to work on a group project. Next was our Professional Services away day where the team attempted to repeat the building task, however, some of the parts and instructions had mysteriously disappeared so there was a lot of improvisation and creative thinking going on. And as if that wasn’t exhausting enough, the afternoon was spent under the instruction of local chef Russell Housley in a chocolate making master class. The whole event was a fingerlicking success. CISTIB held their two day annual retreat at The Ridge in Ranmoor Village with external speakers giving talks on topics such as Imaging Opportunities in Orthopaedics (Prof. Mark Wilkinson from Northern General Hospital) and Quantifying Bone Health and Strength Across the Life Course (Prof. Richard Eastell, Dr Lang Yang and Dr Margaret Paggiosi from the department of Human Metabolism. Students and researchers from CISTIB also had the opportunity to talk to the group on topics outside the remit of their current areas of research. Topics discussed included Research and Software Development, Image Registration, Soft Tissue Failure Methods and Multiscale and Multidisciplinary Review of the Brain in Alzheimer’s Disease. Since the retreat, further discussions have taken place between the CISTIB software developers with Prof Richard Eastell and Dr Margaret Paggiosi to move forward on collaborating on a number of projects.
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Just a quick ride...
to Malaysia
Known by most as ‘Super Awesome Chocolate Guy’, Hisham Burhanuddin has a reputation of being, well, a little bit bonkers. So when he said he’d be riding home after graduation, to Malaysia, we weren’t a bit surprised! As if studying for his masters with us wasn’t a big enough challenge, after doing some work with a homeless charity in Sheffield and seeing the plight of Palestinian refugees in recent news, Hisham decided that he’d like to do something to raise awareness of homelessness worldwide. “Even in developed countries, there are many homeless people. Something needs to be done for them,” Hisham says. Determined to help, Hisham teamed up with three friends and, together, they masterminded a physical feat of astronomical proportions: to ride the 29,000km across continents, through 22 countries and back home; a challenge they estimate could take anywhere between 6 and 17 months!
The Sick Siders will be carrying the Malaysian flag with them throughout their trip in an effort to let the world know about their own country. “We hope to promote Malaysia to the people who don’t know about our beautiful country,” Says Hisham. It’s not just awareness they want to raise, but funds too. Hisham has calculated the cost of the trip to be around RM 100,000 (around £18,500) so the team will be seeking sponsorship to cover this and a third of all funds raised will be given to Homeless International and Refugees of Palestine under the Israa Institution.
The team, calling themselves ‘sick siders Malaysia’, will ride through several European countries to Turkey, then onto Iran, Pakistan, China, Indo-China and Thailand before finally reaching their ultimate destination.
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Flying high Well, maybe not high, but our human powered flight team did achieve takeoff at Lasham airfield this summer... After two years of preparation, planning, design, production and damned hard work, Volaticus finally got the chance to spread its wings this summer in an annual human powered flight competition. Our team didn’t take part in any of the competition elements, but took the opportunity to test out their plane on the runway and gather data to perfect their design with the hope of one day developing a plane that can be packaged and sold commercially to be used by anyone. The team had initially been uncertain as to how their plane might perform, due to the unique design of its wings, but their test flight proved it to be very stable and controllable; because the wing is shorter than standard, Volaticus would be able to fly in high winds where other planes would be grounded. They also agreed that the structural integrity was adequate - the wings didn’t snap, which is always a good feature in a plane. Despite momentarily taking off, the plane was unable to sustain flight which the team put down to the design of the fuselage and transmission system. Because the plane is being pedalled, the fuselage was quite wobbly so this will need to be taken into account in future prototypes and it will be designed to endure more rough handling. Team leader, Ramon Fuentez, a KTP associate working in structural health monitoring says, “The event was a great success even though we didn’t actually sustain flight. We received loads of really good feedback from the organiser, Bill Brookes, who is a world authority on microlites, and lots of practical advice - it might not have gone so well if he wasn’t there to guide us.”
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Where are they now? Carl Naven graduated in 2013 with an MEng in Aerospace Engineering with a year in industry, having done his placement at BAE Systems Maritime. After graduating he rejoined BAE Systems on their Sigma Leadership programme as an engineer. The Sigma programme was established in 1997 with the aim of producing future leaders within BAE Systems. The fast-track scheme lasts for three years exposing its members to a variety of challenging roles. These roles take place across many different domains (air, sea and land) so that at the end of the three years its members can go on to take a substantive delivery role within the business at executive level. The scheme has taken Carl from student to jet-setter in just 12 short months.
His first placement had him working as an Engineering Integration Manager on the Eurofighter Typhoon programme, after which he moved into his current role of Assistant Chief Engineer on the Queen Elizabeth Class Aircraft Carriers. The scheme recruits only a handful of graduates each year and to be considered for the programme, Carl was put through a lengthy selection process, starting with an online
Image source: www.wired.co.uk
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application which includes competency and situational based questions. Following that, Carl was required to complete online numerical verbal and reasoning tests. Once he had demonstrated that he met the core requirements of the programme he was invited to attend a telephone interview where he answered a number of additional situational awareness questions and was eventually invited to a two day assessment centre which combined a variety of exercises to test his engineering leadership potential, which he passed with flying colours! Carl says, “One of the things I enjoy most about my placements is the opportunity to interact daily with a wide number of highly skilled individuals across many different business functions. These individuals come from a diverse range of backgrounds offering me the opportunity to learn from a wealth of experience. As I continue through my placements I hope to continue this interaction and look forward to learning from the collective experience within BAE Systems.” Given that BAE Systems is a global company one of the key aims of the Sigma Leadership Programme is to give experience of operating in an international environment. This experience could be at any one of a number of sites that BAE Systems operates from, be that: America, Australia, South Africa or India to name a few. Carl hopes to complete his international placement in the United States on one of the many products that BAE Systems is involved with. As a recent graduate of the University of Sheffield Carl was invited to a careers fair to represent BAE Systems and its wide range of graduate opportunities. Whilst he was there he was approached by Professor Neil Hopkinson and invited to a discussion about SELA, a proposed leadership academy to be set up for the start of the 2014-2015 academic year. After attending this discussion Carl was very keen to get involved. “I saw this as an opportunity to help develop a group of talented Sheffield undergraduates to become future leaders within the Industry and potentially as future members of the Sigma Leadership programme.”
Carl’s ambition is evident, although he remains philosophical about life after Sigma. “Given the length of time I have left on the programme (2 years) and diversity of the roles that I will be involved with I am trying not to be too prescriptive with my plans post Sigma.” says Carl, “However when my placements come to an end I hope to have learnt and demonstrated the skills required to earn myself an executive position within BAE Systems as an Engineering Manager on one of the company’s larger programmes.” The scheme recruits a number of graduates on an annual basis with applications for the Engineering and Business streams usually opening in the October graduate recruitment window. Graduates can pre-register for the opportunity by emailing sigma.recruitment@baesystems.com
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One of the things I enjoy most about my placements is the opportunity to interact daily with a wide number of highly skilled individuals across many different business functions.
Image source: www.worldmaritimenews.com
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Congratulations to our 2014 graduates!
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Research focus: Optimising the spatial layout of a farm of tidal turbines
Stuart Walker has received a Doctoral Prize Fellowship of £41,970 from EPSRC for his research into understanding the influence of a tidal support structure on the output of a turbine. As we all know, anthropogenic climate change is a huge problem, and a major source of greenhouse gas emissions is the generation of electricity. It is for this reason that renewable energy sources are so important to the future of our planet. However, most sources of renewable energy suffer from a problem: They are unpredictable. We can’t guarantee that the sun will shine or the wind will blow, so we cannot completely get rid of our dependance on burning fossil fuels. Tidal power offers a solution to this problem because the tides are mathematically predictable hundreds of years in advance, and provide four periods of energy generation every day. Tidal power is currently in its infancy, but the UK is a world leader in this technology. We have a resource of around 10GW, and the potential to deliver 20% of our electricity requirements by 2050. Tidal power CO2 emissions are around 50 times less than those of coal-fired power stations, or 25 times less than gas.*
* - Resource / potential from Carbon trust future energy report. gCO2/kWh Coal ~1000, Gas ~500, Tidal ~20. A tidal turbine is an underwater device designed to generate electricity from the ebb and flow of the tide. Visually, these devices are similar to a standard wind turbine, made up of a turbine and blade unit mounted on top of a support structure. Because of the harsh subsea environment, device support structures are of substantial construction and are large enough to influence the flow of water around the turbine unit. Each device is around 30m tall and weighs about 200 tonnes. A 1MW tidal turbine is around a third of the size of a 1MW wind turbine, due to the relative density of water and air (water is 1000 times more dense, so carries much more
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energy than air). At present, costs are high due to the infancy of the industry, but the cost of an installed device is predicted to fall from the current £8million to around £2million over the next decade. Devices will eventually be installed in arrays of up to hundreds of machines, and it is the layout and design of these arrays that Stuart’s work on support structure wakes will inform. Stuart will use data from scale model testing of four support structure designs in order to understand the influence of a tidal support structure on the output of a turbine and, thus, consider the effect of multiple device wakes on turbine performance in a farm or array formation. The models will be tested at 1:72 scale in the water flume at the University of Florence (UNIFI) this month as part of a short MARINET funded project. MARINET, the Marine Renewables Infrastructure Network, is a network of research centres and organisations that are working together to accelerate the development of marine renewable energy technologies - wave, tidal and offshore-wind. It is co-financed by the European Commission specifically to enhance integration and utilisation of European marine renewable energy research infrastructures and expertise. The resulting velocity fields and turbine data will be combined and studied to quantify the performance influence of the structure. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model will be constructed and validated using this data, allowing further study of wake pattern and the optimisation of support structure designs to minimise their influence on turbine performance. Stuart recently attended the Grand Renewable Energy conference in Tokyo, at which he presented a poster on his PhD work and submitted a joint paper with Cora Fung (another Mech Eng PhD student), which was presented by Cora. In September 2015 he will be attending the EWTEC (European Wave and Tidal Energy Conference) in Nantes, France, where he hopes to present the findings of his fellowship project. (http://www.ewtec.org/ewtec2015/).
Funding awarded: A quick look at funding received this quarter Lizzy Cross was awarded £287,063 from £ Dr TSB for her research into Landing Gear
£
Monitoring Systems.
Kamran Mumtaz received £56,000 £ Dr from EPSRC for his investigation into the material properties of customised wood feedstock and depositable liquid binders for additive manufacturing.
Matt Marshall had funding of £132,121 £ Dr from TSB for his Hydratight URMS project.
He also received £52,000 from Network Rail for a separate project looking into High Speed Grinding - Dry Ice Scrubbing.
Rob Dwyer-Joyce was awarded £ Professor £25,000 by EPSRC for his STAMINA project.
Professor Roger Lewis’ submersible pump
£ project looking at a universal auto-coupling
system received £30,060 from UKWIR. He received a further £56,551 from Rail Research UK Association for his Adhesion Riddle Feasability Study on the use of dryice for rail head cleaning.
Kirill Horoshenkov received £ Professor £50,000 from EPSRC for his work on the
development of non-invasive flow monitor.
Total funding received this quarter:
£688,795
Find Stuart at tidalsheffield.wordpress.com
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A blast
from the past
We always try to keep in touch with our past students, so when we had an email from one of our graduates from the summer of ‘69, we were over the moon! Maestro, cue the music... Hugh Fuller came to us for his year abroad from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1969, where he was studying Mechanical Engineering. He only had a year with us, but Hugh remembers his times in Sheffield as some of the happiest in his life. “Looking back, I can truthfully say that my year in Sheffield was one of the happiest and most productive years of my life (before I was married, of course...)” says Hugh, thumbing through stacks of old photos from his time here. After leaving Sheffield, Hugh went back to the States and spent two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and obtained an M.S. in Ocean Engineering after which he went on to pursue a fruitful career in the oil and gas industry.
His first job was with Exxon where he remained until 2004 when he took early retirement from his position as ExxonMobil Production Manager for the United States. He began his career developing a computational fluid dynamics program to predict the motions of tankers moored to production mooring structures. From there, he became involved with various technical aspects of the laying of the Brent Oil line and a subsequent evaluation of pipe lay barges for the purpose of laying a 36 inch line across the Norwegian Trench. While at the research company, he eventually became manager of the Offshore Division. Later, he transferred to major project work. The primary major projects that he headed were the
The 1968 residents of Crewe Hall
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Friends Paul Haigh and Steve Picot outside the Bromhill Tavern, their favourite Sheffield pub.
proposed development of a major gas field (Natuna) and associated liquefied natural gas plant in Indonesia as well as Exxon’s move into Venezuela for Heavy Oil development. In the area of production operations, the company’s U.S. efforts were mostly directed toward improving the output of older onshore fields along with the development of newer fields in the offshore Gulf of Mexico. Internationally, Hugh was the Planning Manager for Exxon International, prior to the merger with Mobil Oil.
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I decided on engineering because I felt it would allow me the widest possible lattitude in choosing a career field. I felt that I would enjoy engineering as applied to oceanograhpy, and have worked toward that goal. Hugh, in the 1970 Junior Year abroad brochure
Clockwise from left: Hugh’s wife, Loni, his sons Alex and Ricky, daughter Jennie and, of course, Hugh himself.
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Hugh had a profile in the 1970 JYA brochure.
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Tulane University Junior Year Abroad contingent aboard the U.S.S. United States ocean liner.
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Just over 100 universities from around the world took part in this year’s Formula Student event at Silverstone, and competition was stronger than ever. Our team did us proud again, passing all their technical and safety checks in record time and without a hitch. The Sheffield results were:
TU Delft were the overall winners with University of Stuttgart in 2nd and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 3rd. The UK teams did better this year than last with Oxford Brookes (5th), Bath (6th) and Cardiff (9th) making the top 10.
Design: 40th (15th out of UK universities) Business planning: 30th (14th out of UK universities) Cost, Manufacturing & Sustainability: 12th (7th out of UK universities) Acceleration: 40th (16th out of UK universities) Skid pad handling: 33rd (11th out of UK universities) Sprint: 39th (16th out of UK universities) Endurance: 52nd (22nd out of UK universities) We finished 40th overall and 14th out of the UK universities. Last year we were 59th and 18th respectively.
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We made a number of significant design changes to our car this year, including a new type of engine, so to do as well as we did is fantastic. We have already started work on the next evolution of the car which we hope will build on this year’s success. Alan Middup Team Principal MechEngNews
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Read all about it! News from around the Department New Faculty Director of Communications and External Relations in the Faculty of Engineering Mechanical Engineering Professor Elena Rodriquez-Falcon has recently stepped away from her role of Director of Women in Engineering which she has been doing since 2011 and taken on a new challenge as the Faculty Director of Communications and External Relations. Elena plans to make a big impact in the faculty and looks forward to sinking her teeth into the role.
Welcome to the team! Matthew Henry joined CISTIB as their new Portfolio Manager in August, taking over from Mark Pullinger. Matthew’s background is in immunology and he has worked on research underpinning vaccine development for diseases such as malaria, TB and HIV. He moved into project management in 2007 and has since worked for various major clients including Health and Safety Executive, Office for Nuclear Regulation, Defra, National Institute for Health Research and other commercial clients. In his free time he enjoys hill walking, mountain biking, church activities and immersing himself in a good second-hand bookshop.
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PhDs awarded Congratulations to everyone who received their PhD this quarter, your hard work and committment has finally paid off! Alex Baker “A study of the tribological processes during the milling of rice” Supervisors: Rob Dwyer-Joyce (2nd Roger Lewis) Ahmed Ballil “Numerical Simulation of Multi-Component Flows with Low to High Density Ratios” Supervisors: Andrzej Nowakowski (Franck Nicolleau) Farzad Barari “Metal foam regenerators; heat transfer and pressure drop in porous metals” Supervisors: Robert Woolley (Stephen Beck) Henry Brunskill “The real-time characterisation of dry machine element contacts using ultrasonic reflectometry” Supervisors: Roger Lewis (Rob Dwyer-Joyce) Zhaolin (Jason) Chen “Micro Air Vehicle Design for Aerodynamic Performance and Flight Stability.” Supervisors: Ning Qin (Andrzej Nowakowski) Shaban Jolgam “An efficient numerical method for simulating multiphase flows with a general equation of state” Supervisors: Andrzej Nowakowski (Franck Nicolleau) Stylianos Katsanis “Numerical modelling of pollution dispersion from open window composting site” Supervisors: Swee Chin (Franck Nicolleau) Steven Pugh “Lubricant performance in aircraft landing gear pin joints” Supervisors: Rob Dwyer-Joyce (Keith Worden) Jonathan Sumanik-Leary “Small wind turbines for decentralised rural electrification: Case studies in Peru, Nicaragua and Scotland” Supervisors: Robert Howell (Aidan While, Town Planning)
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Best paper award Ifigeneia Antoniadou and Keith Worden won the best paper award in the 7th European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring in Nantes, France in July. Their paper on the use of a spatially adaptive thresholding method for the condition monitoring of a wind turbine gearbox proposes an adaptive unsupervised learning method for the feature discrimination part of the gearbox condition monitoring. The threshold in this case is determined by the data and therefore a better recovery of the functions actually occurring with the data can be accomplished. In addition, it was also demonstrated how the method can be applied to features selected from a time-frequency analysis. The method was tested on actual wind turbine gearbox datasets and the results seemed to be improved when compared to older techniques.
Turbine power The University of Sheffield Wind Turbine Group is a branch of Engineers Without Borders, their aim is to give students experience of design and manufacture on a real project and promote green mechanical energy, especially wind power. The team entered their work into the NHL Wind Turbine Design Contest, in July, where universities around Europe design and manufacture a small scale wind turbine according to given rules and operating conditions and are judged on its overall effectiveness. The Sheffield team finished in joint second place at this year’s competition. Team member Tom Wastling says, “It was a really good experience and a lot was learned, we now have a strong team going into next year.�
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Fulbright Scholarship Dr Nathan Crane from the University of South Florida joined Neil Hopkinson and the AdAM team in August on a Fulbright Scholarship. Additive manufacturing can produce remarkable geometries in a growing variety of materials. However, it is still challenging to locally vary the material composition with most processes. Dr. Crane will be exploring ways in which the local geometry can be varied to tune the properties without changing the effective material composition. Dr Crane says, “I’m impressed with the quality of the people and I’m excited to work with Neil and the entire Additive Manufacturing team here in Sheffield. One of the things that attracted me to the University of Sheffield was the opportunity to work with AM proceses that we don’t have available at our university.”
Where’s Wally? When Google came into the new Pam Liversidge building to map the corridors, offices and, of course, our state of the art Biomechanics lab, we decided to have a bit of fun! Before the photographer arrived we hid a bunch of miniature footballers all around the lab. Our little team can be found peeking out from behind machinery, guarding doorways and making phone calls. Why not visit our lab now and see how many of our tiny men you can find... while you’re there, let me know if you spot my specs, I haven’t seen them in months! http://goo.gl/MbYvRK
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The Final Word. In my first term as Head of Department, I’d like to offer a warm welcome to our new students as they settle into their new homes, meet new friends and start on a path to a promising career. I wish you all well and look forward to getting to know you over the coming years. As I welcome one group of students, I have to say goodbye to another; to those who graduated this summer, a huge congratulations, you have all made us enormously proud and we wish you all the very best for the future. We also say thank you to Rob Dwyer Joyce as he hands over the reins of Head of Department – Rob has guided the Department through good times and bad during his six year term, always with pride, positivity and passion and with everyone’s best interests at heart; his are a huge pair of boots to fill and I look forward to the challenge. The Department has seen a lot of change under Rob’s steer and further change is afoot over the next two years as we move into bigger and better facilities, with the launch of the Sheffield Engineering Leadership Academy (SELA), the introduction of a new course in Biomechanics and many more things too, no doubt. It’s an exciting time for me to be taking over this role and I look forward to seeing what the next few years have in store for me, for you, and for us as a department.
Neil Sims
Head of Department, Mechanical Engineering
This publication is produced using 100% recycled FSC certified paper
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