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This event was held at the Town Close School in Norwich and was attended by Society Members and friends as well as past members of previous Town Close Teams. Interesting contributions were also made by representatives of a nearby competitive team - Langley School.
Matt Buck, the event organiser from Town Close School, opened proceedings by explaining what the Greenpower Charity was and how his school had become involved with the electric vehicle aspect of the charity particularly the F24 events because it would involve a sizeable number of pupils working together as a team covering a wide range of skills such as engineering design, hands on construction and planning. The F24 was chosen because it came in a kit form with a basic frame and power source. Teams competing in this category had to conform to the kit dimension and underlying structure and the motor and battery unit were supplied with no substitution being allowed. Otherwise the teams could do what they thought best with the vehicle.
The basic competition was to see how far a given vehicle could go within a given time period of 90 mins on a fixed length enclosed track such as Goodwood or Silverstone or the Lotus test track at Hethel. All drivers had to be 13 or under and there had to be a minimum of 3. No adult could assist in anyway in driver changeovers.
This choice of vehicle allowed his youngsters to come up with all sorts of views as to how the car could be improved such as stream lining the car body without adding too much extra weight. They found that flax based light weight board could be moulded into a stream lined shape for the body and that ceramic bearings for the wheels axles significantly reduced friction. The team also found that keeping the motor from overheating was important and commissioned a suitable heat sink to be manufactured by a parent. They also found that batteries needed to be looked after i.e, kept at about 25 C and charged and discharged in a given way. Another important area that the teams discovered over the years was team work: particularly in the driver changeover sequence. It also turned out that driver training mattered particularly as this was more about vehicle handling in a non energy wasting sense than direct driver on driver racing,
One of the highlights of the evening were the contributions by Tessa and Theo, previous members of the Town Close team. Now no longer team members as they have both moved on to Senior Schools. They each described in outline how they had participated in the team but both stressed that being in the team was not only highly educational but also fun.
Andrew Barnes, CEO of the Bure Valley Railway, began his talk by outlining the early history of the railway; from its early days as a standard gauge line from County School near Dereham to Wroxham to the current 15 inch gauge Aylsham to Wroxham track. He told his audience that the railway had had a chequered history from an ownership point of view partially because the original railway had been built on the cheap causing expensive on going maintenance. Another important factor was that the railway was not as flat as some owners had assumed causing more than anticipated fuel consumption and hence cost. Andrew became involved in the railway in 1997 taking over as managing director a few years later.
When he took over leadership of the railway it was clear that one of the major costs was that of fuel. At the time this was particularly associated with the coal fired steam locomotives. As steam was one of the major draws for the public, switching to diesel, the obvious alternative at the time, was deemed to risky. This turned out to be wise as diesel shot up in price not long after. Andrew and his team decided therefore to examine their locos to see if any efficiency improvements could be made. One important discovery that was made quite early on was that all the locomotives suffered high back pressures in both the cylinders and the associated valve gear.
One member of the team had a close association with the motor racing business. Through these contacts the team worked out that much of the back pressure could be removed by altering the steam flow paths to minimise turbulence. These findings were implemented by redesigning the cylinder feeds and valve gear, These alterations significantly reduced fuel usage. At the same time a programme, that is still ongoing, was initiated to find alternative fuels to coal and diesel. Andrew reported that some success has been reported too in this area. Andrew also reported that the railway had discovered that the ballast used for the track bed was substandard in that it was very spongy in that any motive power unit had to in effect climb out of its own trackway depression which used unnecessary fuel, A programme has been initiated that whenever possible existing ballast is being replaced by granite chippings.
In the final part of his talk Andrew described some innovative work the railway had done in the use of battery powered electromotive power units. The particular locomotive he talked about had lead acid batteries as the power source. These batteries not only were an energy source but also provided the necessary inertia required by power units in a railway situation. The braking in this unit is bi-modal ; frictional and regenerative. Indeed, there have been several complete journeys made when only regenerative braking has been used.
Giancarlo began his talk by telling his audience how he got into AI in the first place given that he studied philosophy as an undergraduate and was a keen musician. He stressed he was not in the business of designing AI tools but very much into using the tools. He felt that his training in clearly expressing concepts/ideas and being able to assess the outcomes of any processes involving these concepts was very important.
Giancarlo then went onto describe why all the fuss about AI had come to the fore in recent years. In his opinion this was partially due to several advancements in technology such as massive rapidly accessible data storage in the cloud and the speed and power of CPUs that enabled appropriately written software to search/query for context linked structures/patterns in the stored data and output them in the form of natural language/visual images easily handled by human beings. If the software was written in a certain way this looked quite like a form of intelligent thinking.
Another important driver of the rise in interest of AI according to Giancarlo was political. Many jobs in the current human jobs market are data searching related and therefore replaceable by these type of AI machines at much lower operating costs. This could have a significant impact on the jobs market; hence severe political repercussions. Giancarlo gave as an example the recent case of the turmoil on the global stock-market of the introduction of the Deep-Seek AI tool.
Giancarlo then spent the next part of his talk giving a top line conceptual picture of how an AI machine is structured and how a search process is conducted. Data is stored in terms of context linked items via a process of training and the machine is designed to respond to a search query with an output that most likely corresponds to its nearest training data. Giancarlo stressing here the importance of the independence of the training data from the testing data before an AI tool is released. Another importance aspect is the bias potentially embedded in the training data. He cited her the example of the Deep-Seek tool which is Chinese in origin and the built in geo-political associations with the current Chinese state.
In the last part of his talk Giancarlo compared and contrasted several AI tools and then spent a little time showing his audience how to use what he considered the current best all round tool; ChatGPT. The event concluded with a lively Q&A which had to be terminated by the President on grounds of running out of time!
In 2019 Plymouth decided that it wanted to commemorate 400 years since the sailing of the ship Mayflower in September 1620 to what is now the USA. As Andy Stanford-Clark, our speaker, explained rather than looking backwards and building a replica, the event organisers decided to be bold and use the occasion to look forward to the future and build an autonomous vessel capable of following the original Mayflower track across the Atlantic.
The organisers put the project in the hands of a locally based company that built specialist submersible craft who had had dealings with IBM in the past via various purchases of control software. This is how Andy had become involved with the vessel, Mayflower 400 as it was to become known as, Early on in the design phase it was decided that there was to be no human crew onboard during the actual crossing and that it had to be able to self-sufficient in fuel; it was hoped initially that all the required energy would be solar derived. Sadly as Andy pointed out, because of the relatively inefficiencies of the available panels of the time, this turned out not to be possible. A supplementary bio-diesel system was fitted to cope with those solar reduced periods.
An important feature of the crossing was not only the crossing itself but the project would take the opportunity of gathering information about the quality of the water wherever the craft was and also the nature of the wildlife in its current vicinity. The inclusion of these tasks impacted the design of the governing software. For instance, as Andy pointed out, the design had to prioritise tasks. In many situations it was important to ensure craft integrity and navigation over making experimental observations. To give his audience some idea of the complexities involved Andy spent several minutes outlining the control software and describing the hardware needed to support it.
Sadly, partially because of the Covid pandemic, the project did not achieve the target sailing date. Also because of the delays, some of the hardware implementation was rushed resulting in the purchase of several below spec parts that, in the harsh maritime environment, failed. These failures had to be rectified causing several false departures.
In the end, the majority of these problemswere ironed out and Mayflower 400 successfully crossed the Atlantic without colliding with any other craft despite one or two 360 deviations on the way. A large amount of data was acquired from the various on board experiments most of which has yet to be analysed. However, some general results about ocean cleanliness, salinity and current strengths have been observed. Importantly for Andy and IBM, the control and ancillary software worked successfully.
The talk was followed by a very lively and interesting Q&A.