MEng Aeronautics student Eddy McInally shares how two major design projects, including a carbon fibre wind turbine and a lunar exploration vehicle, helped develop his understanding of design, manufacturing and systems engineering.
My interest in engineering developed from a love of making and designing things when I was younger. Combined with a growing interest in physics, I realised engineering is the perfect partnership of these two things. Growing up, I spent a lot of my time around the South Kensington area visiting the Natural History Museum, V&A and Science Museum. I would frequently go past Imperial to see what was going on here, and I vividly remember seeing the Formula Student garage as a small child and being very impressed!
I started my undergraduate experience at the University of Bath where I studied Mechanical Engineering, and I realised that the aerodynamics and structural aspects were what piqued my interest. I felt that the course at Imperial better suited these interests, especially my longstanding interest in spacecraft, which I now study through the Spacecraft Engineering pipeline.
First year project: Wind turbine
In the first year, all undergraduate students take part in a group project, where students must design, build, and test a wind turbine. I was assigned to the manufacturing and structures sub-team, and we chose to design a 3-blade propeller with a very fine profile. The options for manufacturing were limited to stacked plywood, acrylic and a 2-hour 3D print.
Realising the difficulty of manufacturing a thin blade, I suggested that we use carbon fibre. After several conversations and help from the technicians in the Department of Aeronautics, we came up with a plan to safely manufacture a carbon fibre wind turbine blade in the student workshop using a wet lay-up of carbon fibre in a stacked plywood mould. Whilst the first blade did get stuck in the first mould, we quickly rebuilt it and finished just in time. The turbine was then tested in the Peter Bearman and John Harvey wind tunnels where it produced a peak power of 24 watts. The project was a great way to learn how to practise engineering safely, and it was rewarding to be so supported by the technicians while trying something different. Due to our work, carbon fibre is now explicitly listed as a banned material for the project!
Group Design Project
At the end of the third year, all undergraduate students take part in the Group Design Project (GDP), where you work with 20 students in 3-person subgroups to fulfil a design brief. Each student will do weekly presentations to their supervisors before finally writing a report about their design. As a student on the Spacecraft Engineering pathway, I elected to work on the Traceless Lunar Exploration project. I was part of the lander design subgroup where I was responsible for the configuration and structural design of the vehicle. One of the biggest differences in GDP is its focus on systems-level engineering, which can’t be practised through examinations. Ensuring all components of a design integrate nicely is challenging and something I found very interesting. In my design, I chose to try something new with a horizontal lander to improve stability upon landing on the lunar surface and to make the surface more accessible to astronauts. This created a difficult challenge structurally as the vehicle would have to endure loading along two different axes, whereas typically a vertical lander has forces through one axis. Taking inspiration from bridges and inter-tank lattice connectors from rockets, I developed a truss-based structure. I verified the design using ABAQUS CAE, which is a piece of software used for structural analysis. The hardest part of the process was ensuring that the structure was compatible with constantly changing specifications as the design evolved, which required several iterations of the structure. All in all, it was probably the most enjoyable part of the undergraduate course!