Dr Jill Stewart, Senior Lecturer in Thermofluids in the School of Engineering has secured a 3-year KTP grant in collaboration with Napier Turbochargers Lincoln.
The project will develop a design methodology of turbocharger compressor impellers that are resilient to typical manufacturing tolerances thus maintaining efficiency and reducing manufacturing non-conformance cost.
The project is anticipated to commence in August 2011
Napier Turbochargers is a wholly self-owned company, having previously been owned by Siemens Power Generation, specifically Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery Ltd being based on the same site in Lincoln when it bought the neighbouring Alstom Power Turbines in March 2003; Alstom (former GEC-Alsthom) had owned the company since GEC bought English Electric in the late 1960s.
Lincoln City Council has secured approval to purchase a Rapid Manufacturing Machine in order to establish a facility which is accessible to local businesses as part of a commitment to promote and encourage the growth of engineering and innovation activity in the local economy.
The School of Engineering is fully committed to this initiative, which is part of its engagement process with local industry and a long term close collaborative relationship with the City Council.
Dr Jonathan Lawrence, who is Reader and Head of the Laser Materials Processing Group in the School, has sourced a machine in China, and will be travelling out to Shanghai in the near future to perform a technical verification before the unit is shipped to Lincoln.
The School will be working closely with the Council to promote the usage of the facility, and will be subsequently working with local businesses to fully utilise it.
The EOS P380 machine uses a high-powered laser, which fuses metal powder into a solid part by melting it locally using the focused laser beam. Parts are built up additively layer by layer. This process allows for highly complex geometries to be created directly from the 3D CAD data, fully automatically, in hours and without any tooling, producing parts with high accuracy and detail resolution, good surface quality and excellent mechanical properties.
The Sir Frederick Mappin Building at Sheffield University, which houses the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. The Machines and Drives Group occupies the left wing of the building
Way back in another millennium, I was a hard up first year undergraduate in Control Engineering at Sheffield University, and overheard a conversation that a disabled PhD student in the Electrical Engineering Department had a grant to pay for a part-time lab technician to build rigs etc. for his research. I presented myself in the Mappin Building (pictured) the next morning at 9.00am, of course the PhD student in question didn’t roll up till mid-day! My first lesson about academia.
Keith Leonard was the PhD researcher in question, and he gave me the job. Now in addition to my degree, I was spending all my spare time building power electronics, data acquisition systems and learning how to programme in assembler and ‘C’ for real time control. I was also (although I didn’t know it then) about to embark on a 16 year association with the Department’s Electrical Machines and Drives Group (EMD). The group had a reputation for working and playing hard, and had risen to being one of the biggest and best of its kind in Europe. This was the turning point for me, I couldn’t believe how exciting research was, and fired me up to set goals to become a researcher.
Of course I still had the business of finishing my degree, and spent the final substantial part of it in one of the EMD labs completing my final year project in Real-Time Fuzzy Logic Control. The important thing here is that Engineering has been doing its own version of ‘student as producer’ for a long, long time. Lecturers tend to be research active, degrees are very ‘hands on’, projects are real-life problems, and funding has historically been there to encourage and retain students into research. I had no idea about the mechanics of research and publishing, so it wasn’t until much later that I realised the significance of my undergrad project and published on it:
Stewart P., Stone D.A. and Fleming P.J. “Design of robust fuzzy-logic control systems by multi-objective evolutionary methods with hardware in the loop” IFAC Journal of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Vol.70, no.3, pp.275-284, May 2004.
Keith Leonard strikes a pose at the EMD Research Group fancy dress party in '97
I guess that really is ‘student as producer’. However the real story here is capturing people’s attention and firing their enthusiasm to become active researchers. My story started as an undergrad in Lab D137 in the Mappin Building, a lab which was always my home more than any office became. Chris Bingham (now here at Lincoln as Professor of Energy Conversion in the School of Engineering) joined the group in 1994 from Cranfield, and we started what has turned out to be a very long-standing research collaboration.
Keith never finished his PhD, but he was still an excellent researcher, shame he couldn’t have written his thesis on beer, kebabs and curry. He inspired me, and I wouldn’t be here doing what I do without Keith.
Dr Jill Stewart, Senior Lecturer in Thermofluids in the School of Engineering has secured a 3-year KTP grant in collaboration with Napier Turbochargers Lincoln.
