Third Year 

This year I have been mainly working on my final engineering project. I have been studying the potential of ionic wind for a light aircraft propulsion system. I have designed and 3D printed two systems: one to characterise the displacement caused by the ionic wind and the other to spin a small aircraft model. Both have been very successful and produced interesting results. Despite the closure of the university, I still managed to build a small aircraft model which rotated with no propulsive mechanism other than the ionic wind.

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Second Year

In my second year reading Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Leeds I studied:

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• Engineering Mechanics

• Vibration and Control

• Design and Manufacture

• Economics and Management

• Mechatronics and Measurement Systems

• Thermofluids

 

My favourite module was Vibration and Control as it was very complex and took a lot of understanding but led to a real sense of satisfaction when it finally made sense. I also enjoyed the maths elements of Engineering Mechanics, especially Laplace transforms. We also visited the Farnborough Air Show (the image above shows inside an aircraft carrier there).
 

This year I have worked on quite a few engineering projects, including:

• Modelling improvements to a lock

• Designing and building a Mars rover

• Designing and building a water powered turbine

• Completing an economic analysis of electric cars

• Modelling the vibration of an aero engine

 

I most enjoyed designing and building the turbine: we calculated the number of buckets needed and then designed the turbine using Solidworks. When we manufactured the turbine and tested it, we generated around 20kW of power in 10 seconds!