School of Engineering laboratories transcript

Laboratories form a key part of both the first year and the second year undergraduate syllabus and programme. All first and second year students will undertake laboratories.  Typically around about 2-3 hours per week.  The aim of the labs is to reinforce the subject matter material that is introduced in the lectures and practised in the tutorials.  You will be in a group of about 5 students with a postgraduate student demonstrator who will be able to help. 

Now the labs vary in subject and in complexity, however they typically fall into two areas which include the dynamics and the statics part, so this is the mechanics aspect this includes static and dynamic balance, centrifugal force and they also cover thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and heat transfer and examples would be the Rankine cycle and the motion and flow through ducts. 

In year 1 you will typically complete the short lab report within the lab session.  In year 2 you will complete a more detailed laboratory report, one per semester based on the lab.  This is where you will do a full formal lab report and you will look at the background, the aims the objectives, the experimental details, results and discussion you are trying to focus on three main areas for the lab.  What did you do and what does it mean?  How you put it into context and you are also looking for the sources of errors.  Often the real world theory will often disagree with the theoretical knowledge learnt in the lectures. 

Labs typically take place in two buildings: so they take place in the Engineering Building or they take place in their building in front of us in the Collaborative Teaching Laboratory.  Here you can see an example of one of our computer clusters located within the Collaborative Teaching Laboratory.  This is a nice bright, airy space and, as part of the labs, all students will be expected to do preliminary lab material before they attend the lab and this might be an example of one of the areas you would do this in.

Within the Engineering Building we have the Collaborative Teaching Laboratory (Engineering) and you can see an example here inside and you can see the students and the demonstrators doing a laboratory session.  Then moving through additional images showing you a variety of settings.

An example of one of the labs would be the static and dynamic balance.  Here you have got an example of the equipment that we would use.  This contains the shaft that is rotating with various red bits that are sticking out and this might be an example of say a shaft from a ship or an engine or anything that rotates and we replace those red bits at different angles we will be looking at what happens.  We are also adding different masses to them as well so we can try and create some vibration we can try in different directions so we can try and resolve the forces. We can try and move it in all directions, so we get a nice smooth rotation.  This is important because if your forces are out of balance you might get excessive load on the shafts or you might get excessive loads on the bearings which lead to failure.  You can see an example here with the three masses, so what we have is the three masses so you can see on the on the top there we have it statically balanced and you can see we have got the forces, we have go the angles and we are resolving them and then this becomes a bit harder when you start to dynamically balance them but you will cover the theory there. 

Another example of a laboratory may be the Rankine Cycle.  The Rankine Cycle is a thermodynamic cycle that is used to predict the performance of steam turbines. Steam turbines are typically used in generation of electricity and they are an idealised thermodynamic cycle of a heat engine that converts heat into mechanical work and you can see that through the picture in the middle where we have got cold water that is heated through a heating element that is then converted to steam.  The steam flows through pipes and into a turbine that spins at many thousand rpm and actually creates mechanical work out or electricity in the case of a power plant. The steam then is converted back into liquid flows back and it is a closed cycle.  You can evaluate this and in your lectures and tutorials you will actually look and you can see an example of the cycle on the bottom right hand corner and what you will do in the lab is you will do the pre lab material, you will try and calculate some of the values that you would expect.  You would then come into the lab and you will look at various flow rates of fluids, various temperatures, various pressures, various work out and you will try plot the Rankine cycle for your particular case of results and you will compare and contrast that to the real life one and you will try and see how do the differences meet up, is there a large error, what could it be caused by, could it be caused by pipe loses, could it be caused by thermodynamic losses, could it be caused by measurement errors all these will form part of the right write up.

So far you have looked at years 1 and 2 at actually conducting the experiments, you have looked at how you go about doing, how you are going to take reading and then also how you write them up.  You haven’t really designed the experiments yourself. In years 3 and 4 through the individual engineering project you look at that aspect.  It is typically aligned to a research area of the School, however, it may also be one that you suggest or it may also be an industry led project. What you have got to do is look through the background information, find out a niche and a novel area you could explore.  You will then conduct a literature review, design an experiment, conduct it, evaluate it, interpret it, review it critically to try and determine the positive aspects and perhaps the negative aspects.

You can see some examples there through, for example freeze water desalination in the top left, this is where you are perhaps looking at different temperatures and what you are trying to do is to freeze water to remove the salt from it. You might be looking at robotic disassembly designing an end effector that needs testing for removing say bolts from a mobile phone.  Bottom left one shows CFD modelling and aerodynamic testing of a car and this is where you are looking at the models to try and predict the airflow and then you are using our wind tunnel to try and actually create models of the designs to see how they react to the fluid flow in that wind tunnel. On the right hand side there is industrial project this is ultrasonic assisted micromachining of ceramic materials.  So this is a standard milling process with a cutting tool that is rotating but also the work piece is moving up and down, only very small about 5 microns up to 20000 times per second.  What we are looking at there is that we are actually trying to improve the performance in the tool life and you can see some of the results that we have got from those tests that we have done there. 

Thank you.