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Welcome to the Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering here at Loughborough.
We understand some of you won't be able to make it to the open day so we'll be
showing you around instead so you can get an idea of what we have to offer.
There's so much on offer here at University that we all have different specialties,
so we'll be going around together to show you everything we've got.
So here we are down in the engine test cell. This is used in first-year
thermodynamics to look at heat cycles with an engine as well as second year
powertrain technologies where you'll come down and run a full internal
combustion engine test yourself. We've got a water brake dynamometer at the rear and
all the instrumentation found around is that as you'd find out in industry.
You'll come down as a team of five or six and get all the test data yourself
that will feed into your coursework projects.
This is our six axis motion simulator which we use to demonstrate the basics
of controlling either an aircraft or a ground-based vehicle.
If you're an Aeronautical student we now take you to Cranfield University and get you on a
real-life aircraft to do some basic flight testing.
This is STEMLab, a 17 million pound investment made by the University.
During the course, students come here to take part in a variety of different labs.
This is the composite structures testing lab where final year project students
apply what they've learned in the lower years using machines like this one
to impact composite sandwich structures that they've made.
They then take these samples and place them in the machines like the ones behind you.
to check that the residual properties are sufficient to allow them to survive in F1 after a crash
or in-service on an aircraft after a bird strike.
This is our anechoic chamber which is where we measure noise that is external from outside influences.
So for example the whole building is on springs which prevents any vibration from the ground
and also we have the padding on the walls which prevents any reverberations
from any sound that is made within.
This is useful for research into things such as electric vehicles now where you
don't have the engine sound to mask things such as suspension creaks or wiper motor uses.
Another example of what we're doing with industry is about the sound that a door makes when you shut it.
So originally people would put weight into the door to make it sound more luxurious.
However, now with the focus on lightening and making the whole car more efficient,
they're doing a lot more in terms of tuning the door to make that sound
even with a lighter weight material.
This is the wind tunnel area. In AAE we have four wind tunnels. These are the largest two of them.
So we've got the teaching tunnel on my left and the large wind tunnel on my right
which is big enough to fit quarter-scale models of cars like these.
It's also big enough to fit in a cyclist and we've done some work with Team Sky Racing.
We've also done some work with Adidas, designing every World Cup football since 2006
such as this one used in the Brazil World Cup.
Here we are in the autonomous vehicles lab with lots of different research into the kind of sensors
and technology that's upcoming, including driverless cars as well as autonomous drones.
First example this is the Jackal. This uses a LIDAR sensor, so laser imagery.
Looks at the reflectivity of the material and the signal that produces back and you can
see the readout on the screen. If you wave your hand you can actually see it on the display there.
We then can see some of the drones that we use for some of the projects.
So here are a few examples used for some of these final year projects,
ranging from the crop-spraying robot as well as the badminton-playing robot.
We've got a drone set up in an optical tracking environment, so a range of cameras set up
in the ceiling and around this framework position that drone exactly.
We can see on this screen where it is. So we'll take it for a flight now
and you'll be able to see here it will track it around.
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