Happy Birthday Wynne!

Best wishes to you =)

Happy 2 decades!!!
See you again soon.

Design - Build - Test - Compete

This was the flyer that was being passed around in the first week of Uni. A design challenge organized by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in association with the University of Bolton. The competition required teams to design and build an energy absorbing structure which was to protect a simulated pedestrian against impact from a simulated vehicle. The way the test was carried out is shown in the following diagram. Simplistically, the winning design is the one that would allow the most weight to be lifted to the maximum height and released without the glass slide breaking. If a tie was to occur, then the lightest structure would win.
The reception from the our school's first year Engineering students was pretty good. If i am not mistaken, 6 teams from our university enrolled for it. Since the rules states that each university is only allowed 2 representing teams, an 'internal' competition was first carried out to select the two best teams that would represent the University of Manchester in the finals which was held at the University of Bolton. I am really fortunate to be one of them. The other member of my team was Johannes, from Germany. It was great fun working with him on this project. We managed to learn a lot from each other. After lots of time and effort carrying out researches and building several prototypes we came out with the following design.
We also had to come up with a poster that publicise's the team's work. I can still remember getting to the Uni at 2am in the morning to meet up with Johannes to finish off our poster on the day of the finals.



On the day itself the challenge comprised of 3 parts. First, to compete against other teams, using standardised test methods and equipment to demonstrate the performances of the structure. Second, to see which team came up with the best poster and thirdly, a short presentation describing the work. There were altogether 10 teams from 5 different Universities during the finals. After a long and tiring day full of rounds after rounds of tests, presentations and talks, the results was announced. The Champions and 1st Runner up when to Manchester Metropolitan University (our neighbouring University). Johannes and I managed a third place whereas the other team from our University won the Best poster prize. We are pretty satisfied with the result eventhough our testings suggested we could do much better.

Through my participation in this activity, I gained valuable exposure and learnt many important lessons, and most of all I had had a whale of a time. The following are pictures taken on the day of the finals at the University of Bolton.



Photos taken by Dennis Holland, Martin Sinclair, Adrian Greenhalgh and Andrew Pinkerton on December 3rd 2008