Facilities Development

The ENSPIRE lab has a flume designed for characterising the flow over objects approximately 30cm in length. The commissioning process will involve filling the tank and testing for leaks, then characterising the flow and designing flow straighteners to generate as laminar a flow as possible through the working section.

By generating a sheet of laser light with diverging lenses, it is possible to visualise the vorticity in a flow using a high speed video camera system to track the motion of neutrally buoyant particles in the water. This project will be about setting up and calibrating the lab's DPIV system and designing the upgrades required to take it to full 3D.

The lab has recently taken delivery of Prof Gebel's old wind tunnel. The equipment has all had an upgrade, but still needs commissioning and calibrating. This project will be about getting the tunnel working, then characterising the flow in the working section and making simple measurements over objects of known hydrodynamic behaviour in order to calibrate the system.

Hidden away in building 6 is a virtual environment just waiting to happen. This project is about bringing to life the lab's 200° wrap-around projection screen system. It will start with something simple like a flight or driving simulator, but the eventual goal is to turn it into a virtual bridge for the roboboat..

Thanks to some hard work during an excellent recent bachelor's thesis, the lab is now equipped with a spincasting machine for investment moulding. The machine is designed to make small metal parts by casting wax models of them in plaster which are then melted out of the mould. Molten metal is then forced into the mould by centrifugal force in the spinning machine. This project is about commissioning the machine and developing a production system to generate parts printed on a 3D printer. 

Three-dimensional scanning of small objects is straightforward to do with the tools available in the faculty. However, for larger objects, like a human body or the hull of one of our submarines, a larger scale scanner is required. This machine should be based on a laser rangefinder that rides on a CNC controlled carriage over a defined set of tracks.

ENSPIRE's manual driven mill is the busiest machine in the workshop. This project is about designing and deploying a stepper motor based retrofit to convert it into an automated 3-axis CNC milling machine.

As a Christmas present at the end of 2020, the lab received enough funding to buy the components for a large format (cubic metre) 3D printer. The design is based on a similar machine the lab built for a partner university in Ghana. Ours needs to be assembled and commissioned, then calibrated. A user interface needs to be designed and the manufacturing process needs to be properly characterised and documented.

(Fabio Biffo)

This project is about commissioning the lab's new 4th axis for the CNC milling machine, and in particular about making it work well with Fusion 360. The thesis will be about characterising cutting speeds and pressures to expand our machine's ability to carve high quality models in 3 full dimensions without having to change the clamping.

As part of a project to make flow sensors, we need a very precise (roughly 1 um) moving stage to enable the cutting of very fine patterns in plastics and printed circuit boards. An initial design exists - this project will be about adapting that to our workshop and actually building/commissioning/calibrating it.

This project is about upgrading a testing stage so that its electrodyamic shaker can be used to measure the dynamic elastic properties of small samples of rubber, elastomers and biological materials.

The faculty has just taken delivery of a 3,6m box trailer. This project is about designing the interior to fit machines, consumables, workbenches and tools, into twelve 120x80x90 cubes that can be easily loaded into the trailer but which will fold out into a full FabLab in a school parking lot, for example. The project is a joint venture between the University's new miniFabLab project and the Internationalisation team in T&B.

In preparation for a new MSc course in WS23, the lab would like to convert one of its old exercise machines into a biomechanics research tool. This project is about designing and implementing a sensor system to measure the ground contact force  and a video tracking system to record the kinematics of walking and running.