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Budding young engineers aged 13 to 18, from schools and colleges across the country - from Bristol to Sheffield - are taking part in a three-month design challenge to tackle aircraft noise.
One spring Saturday afternoon, the Project Design Workshop in Cambridge University’s Department of Engineering is a hive of activity. Against a background hum of conversation, and the sound of sawing, one small knot of students stands at the milling machine, drilling right-angled slots in a metal tube. Another group, supervised by the Department’s Dr Peter Long, clusters around a guillotine, cutting carefully measured strips of metal.
But these students are not undergraduates. They are budding young engineers, aged 13 to 18, taking part in a three-month design challenge with Cambridge’s Engineering Department to tackle aircraft noise. Working in teams, the students – from schools and colleges across the country, from Bristol to Sheffield – are doing a project related to the Cambridge-MIT Institute's Silent Aircraft Initiative. This initiative links researchers at Cambridge and MIT with industrial partners to design a radically quieter passenger plane, and includes research into ways to reduce the noise from the undercarriage – one of the major noise sources on a landing aircraft. So this challenge has tasked these young students to design, and make a model of, a quieter undercarriage.
The 25 students participating today are all part of the gifted and talented stream in their local areas; they secured places on the challenge through the National Academy for Gifted & Talented Youth (NAGTY). Since January, they have been working together in teams on their designs. As they are scattered across the country, they communicate with their fellow team-members by using secure online discussion forums and sophisticated design software provided by the Engineering Department.
This mirrors a situation they may later encounter in the workplace, says Dr Long, who set up the online forums. He heads the CMI Multi-disciplinary Design Project that is producing new educational resources for teaching multi-disciplinary work, including a CD, hardware and printed teaching resources.
He says, “In real life you might find yourself in industry, working in a team with colleagues you don’t know, perhaps in different locations and different time-zones. So we set the students ‘real-life’ conditions in which they had to use new technology to work with colleagues based in other locations. It means that, in addition to learning how to apply science to practical situations, they are also developing the sorts of transferable skills needed by industry.”
Today it all comes together. After weeks of meeting online, creating drawings of their model undercarriage using computer-aided design tools, and submitting them to the Engineering Department, the student teams finally meet in person. They have about five hours to collect the component parts they designed, put together their models, and make final adjustments. Then it’s upstairs to the Markham wind tunnel, to test their models in the kind of air speeds a landing aircraft would encounter.
As the minutes tick away, some projects are frantically adjusting their designs. One team has created a telescopic undercarriage, where the wheels are on a spring-loaded leg just like a real aircraft. But a major design flaw has been identified – they forgot to incorporate a ‘stop’ mechanism that would prevent the lower part of the leg falling right out! So the team hastily goes into a huddle with their mentor, visiting researcher Camille Van Rijn, to discuss solutions.
Overcoming such setbacks is one of the reasons the students are enthusiastic about the challenge. Jacob Saxton-Smith, 14, from Longsands College in Cambridgeshire says:
"I really liked the idea that we could design our own creation. We were told what we were aiming to do, but not how to do it - we could use our own ideas. I enjoyed that."
Will Dobson, 14, from High Storrs School in Sheffield, says:
"I wanted to do this challenge because I am interested in planes and in engineering. I thought before that a university engineering course might be a bit academic for me, when I like doing practical, hands-on things. But this challenge has really opened my eyes to engineering and what it can achieve, so it's changed my mind a bit."
And members of the Engineering Department are impressed by their efforts. Second year undergraduate Phil Ward is mentoring one of the teams. He says:
"It's been a big learning curve for them, particularly because of range of ages here, but nonetheless they have had good ideas. My team came up with a teardrop design - for a 'fairing' mounted on the suspension system to make it more aerodynamic - by themselves."
Dr Long says:
The image on this page shows Kati Pantling, 15, from Warwick, centre, with other members of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth taking part in the Cambridge University Engineering Department Silent Aircraft Undercarriage Challenge.Last updated:25/04/06"This was a tough challenge for the students. We treated them as though they were in industry and demanded industry-level drawings from them. But it has also been very useful for us: we have learnt an enormous amount from it about the resources we are developing as part of the Multi-disciplinary Design Project for the teaching of engineering in schools."