May 2011

IEEE Technical Committee membership for Engineering’s Dr. Wing-Kuen Ling

Paul Stewart

Engineering’s Dr Wing-Kuen Ling (better known to us all as ‘Bingo’) has been given the prestigious invitation to join the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers’ Circuits and Systems Society Technical Committee on Nonlinear systems.

The IEEE is the world’s largest society for the advancement of technology.

The IEEE Circuits and Systems Society is the leading organization that promotes the advancement of the theory, analysis, design, tools, and implementation of circuits and systems. The field spans their theoretical foundations, applications, and architectures, as well as circuits and systems implementation of algorithms for signal and information processing.

Dr 'Bingo' Wing-Kuen Ling

The Society brings engineers, researchers, scientists and others involved in circuits and systems applications access to the industry’s most essential technical information, networking opportunities, career development tools and many other exclusive benefits.

Local members with similar technical interests engage in professional exchange through the Society’s 10 regional chapters in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Asia, Australia and the Pacific.

Lincoln:Engineering at ICMAT 2011 in Singapore

Paul Stewart

ICMAT – The International Conference on Materials for Advanced Technologies will be held at Suntec in Singapore from 26th June to the 1st July 2011.

The conference attracts more than 2000 delegates, including plenary lectures from many Nobel Prizewinners. It is organised by the Materials Research Society of Singapore, and is affiliated to the International Union of Materials Research Societies (IUMRS)

Lincoln University will be represented by members of the School of Engineering, and will feature some of the Interdisciplinary work on BioInformatics currently being performed by Prof Paul Stewart in collaboration with Prof Dave Fernig of the University of Liverpool.

Also representing Lincoln will be Dr Colin Dowding of the School of Engineering who will be presenting on Laser Materials Processing for BioMimetics.

Profs Stewart and Fernig will be presenting in:

Symposium: Frontiers in Optical Bio-imaging and Microscopy

The symposium includes cutting edge methodologies in optical, spectroscopic and kinetic imaging microscopy. The methodologies include novel probe techniques as well as novel microscopies. The imaging and spectroscopic methods that will be showcased will be already or could very soon be applied to biological imaging. Imaging methods include: refractive index change, interferometry, tomography (OCT), lifetime imaging, spectral imaging, TERS, SERS, photothermal imaging, STED, PALM, STORM and FIONA, fluorescence plus others.

  • Fernig D.G. and Stewart P.“Heparan sulfate determines the modes of diffusion of fibroblast growth factor 2 within the pericellular matrix”
  • Stewart P. and Fernig D.G. ‘Bio:Eng, Bridging the gaps between engineering and biology’

Dr Dowding and Prof Stewart will be presenting in:

Symposium: Nanoscale Patterning, Assembly, and Surface Modification

More information on the conference can be found at:

http://www.mrs.org.sg/icmat2011/

Energy recovery from landing aircraft

Paul Stewart

This is an EPSRC funded project:

  • EP/H004351/1: Feasibility Study, Energy Recovery from Landing Aircraft. Collaborating company: EADS Innovation Works

which is run by Prof Paul Stewart and Dr David Waugh in the School of Engineering at the University of Lincoln. It is one of a portfolio of projects awarded from the EPSRC Sandpit Low Carbon Airports. All the project researchers and PIs associated with this Sandpit are members of the Airport Energy Technologies Network (AETN), which is hosted here at Lincoln University.

Rationale

On account of the enormous pressures on numerous industries to cut down upon their carbon emissions it is not surprising to identify that one such industry is that of the airline industry. With aircraft transport becoming more widely used, along with aircraft becoming larger (for example the Airbus A380), it is possible for one to realize the large potential gains that recovering energy from aircraft would offer in terms of feeding that energy back into the national grid or storing the energy locally on the aircraft for use in recovered energy assisted take-off.

How much energy is associated with a landing aircraft?

We can make assumptions to illustrate the magnitude of kinetic energy available via a small commercial airliner:

Taking an Airbus A320 with landing mass m = 6.5×104 kg, with landing speed ν = 61.69 ms-1

we can calculate the kinetic energy E = 1.248 J.

Assuming a runway length of 1.2km gives us a linear acceleration of -1.59 ms-2

and a stopping time of 38.80s, which gives us a peak transferrable power of 3.2MW

Therefore, it is possible to realise that for a typical Airbus A320 the potential energy which could be recovered is very large with peak transferable powers of up to 3.2 MW being available. Furthermore, this becomes an even more attractive means when taking into account multiple landings as busy airports which leads to average transferable powers of up to 1 MW. In addition to this, one can see that over time aircraft will become bigger having even larger landing weight, such as the Airbus A380,  which will increase the potential power output by up to 10 times the figures stated here for the Airbus A320


Setting up the engine laboratories in the New School of Engineering

Paul Stewart
Engine lab control room for the Free-Piston Engine

It’s only 12 weeks until we move into our new building. On the ground floor are some of our experimental laboratories, in particular our engine test cells. The cells each have an associated control centre separated by safety materials, from where experiments can be conducted remotely.

Pictured is the control centre for the Lotus Free-Piston Engine when it was under development in the Test Cells at the University of Loughborough, with the actual engine cell visible in the background through double safety glass.

The task I’ve got now is to move our experimental engines into the new build, and get them all running, commissioned and most challenging of all, correctly wired up into the data acquisition and control systems.

A fully working and commissioned Lotus Free-Piston Engine

The picture of the Lotus engine gives an indication of the amount of sensor and actuator cabling associated with each engine.

Engines are generally under computer control via either LabView, or running Matlab and Simulink developed control algorithms under DSpace. It’s quite rare for me to hand write code these days, DSpace compiles control structures from simulink into C, and downloads it onto ta converters.he host control microprocessor and associated A-D and D-A converters.

A lot of our engine laboratory equipment has been stored at the ThinkTank until the move, so we’re just starting the process of going through it all and allocating space.

A haulage company delivering some of our dynamometer equipment to the ThinkTank prior to our move.

Research Brainstorming and ‘Sandpits’

Paul Stewart
IWWMW Wall

I have trawled some more photos of Research Brainstorming and Sandpits out of the vaults. There are lots of different methods of brainstorming for research projects and solutions, so I’ve posted some ideas from another Sandpit which was operated by Proctor and Gamble.

The method centres around the IWWMW (which stands for ‘In What Way Might We?’) wall. This wall acts as a focus for the day’s (or week’s) activities.

In the first instance, after a problem briefing, the wall is open to place posts centred around the core problem issues ‘in what way might we solve x?’

Only two types of post are allowed: proposals and IWWMWs. Proposals group with problem issues, and suggest avenues of technology, research or solutions. At no time is criticism allowed, the only way to address proposals is via another layer of IWWMWs.

The wall develops...

Good sport is to be had during the ‘re-alignment’ sessions, where everyone has the opportunity to move any or all the posts around on the wall to bring associated problems and solutions together into research projects. Sometimes it seems like the entire wall is in movement at the same time.

Project re-alignment session

This very basic methodology is one which I’ve found to be the most effective for brainstorming and working up research proposals. A session like this can easily generate a dozen Research Council standard proposals between a couple of dozen people if everyone buys into the process.

Brainstorming briefing