Welcome to NES 2024-25

Our Mission

Welcome to the Norwich Engineering Society, an active forum dedicated to fostering the exchange of ideas and experiences among all those passionate about engineering — past, present, and future.

For over a century, we have focused on the people behind groundbreaking innovations and their visionary concepts. Our mission is to enlighten, support, and develop our members in Norfolk and beyond. We achieve this through unique engagements, dynamic events, informative seminars, and insightful publications.

By championing the diverse disciplines within engineering, we ensure its continued evolution and relevance in an ever-changing world.

Measurement- Dec 2nd 2024

In his introduction, John Pickering who runs a local electronics consultancy company - Metron based at Reepham, stressed the importance of measurement in any successful engineering project and why it was vital for successful engineers to understand all the ramifications of the process.

In the first part of his talk, John took us through the early history of how measurements came to be. An important part was bought about through the process of trade and trying to minimise the apparent natural tendency for some humans to cheat. Another driver was safety; ensuring any construction is fit for purpose. Curiosity was also of significance. To understand what was going on around them humans had to make accurate and precise correlated observations that were communicable to others. This led through to the need for agreed standards and the tools to maintain them.

John pointed out that all measurements are made relative to the standards via instruments that are calibrated relative to these standards. He also made the very important observation that a single measurement is unique and that it is vital, if at all possible, to make several measurements of nominally the same quantity and infer its actual value and precision via statistical averaging.

John then spent a little time on ensuring that the Members had a good understanding of the implications of the terms accuracy and precision. In his working life John hinted that he had come across too many examples of engineers who had made very precise measurements of inaccurate values because of some unidentified systematic shift in the underlying value; sometimes referred to as a systematic error.

John concluded his talk by looking at the idea of a standard how current thinking was to have the basic standards expressed in terms of quantum constants e.g. electronic charge and Plancks constant rather than a directly measurable quantity such as a metre for length and a kilogram for mass of the SI system. John pointed out that the only SI standard that had not yet been practically transferred to a quantum standard was that of electrical current. The problem here being the smallness of the electronic charge, Practical currents have many millions of electrons so counting individual ones is totally impractical!!

Textiles in 18th Century Norwich - Nov 18th 2024

In his introduction, Dr Michael Nix, explained that he had chosen the 18th century as this was the period when the Norwich textile business was at its height in Europe and further afield. However, before looking at how cloth orders came about and how they were delivered, Michael described how the cloth was manufactured from the raw material through to final bale.

The bulk of Norwich cloth manufacturing was at the top end of the market with wool as the main material source; the final product was loosely known as Worstead cloth. This style was developed in the middle ages at Worstead, a village some 15miles north of Norwich. The interesting features about the yarn produced by the Worstead process was that it was from long fibre wool from sheep farmed in Lincolnshire and Leicestershire with a smaller amount coming from southern Ireland. The first process with this wool is to align the fibres by combing. Once the fibres are aligned they are spun into tightly bound yarn. Most cloth is coloured by the process of dyeing. This can be done either before or after weaving. If the latter, this tends to be when large areas of the finished product is of one colour. Most products were multicoloured. Most of the dyes were produced locally with the ingredients imported from overseas from as far afield as the Americas and the East Indies.

The next stage, once the yarn has been fully prepared, was to weave and finish the cloth to the required standard. Michael went into detail about what looms were used to achieve the ordered patterning and how the final cloth was finished through the process of syngeing and calendaring where heat and pressure was used to achieve the required strength and sheen.

Michael concluded his talk looking at the commercial side of the textile business. He illustrated this with a cloth order for waistcoats particularly popular in Russia at the time. He showed examples of the pattern books that used, how agents obtained the order and the other processes involved supporting the actual production of the ordered cloth. For example, the transport involved and the required financial structures, such as banking and insurance, to ensure that the order was delivered. One of the elements that was obvious throughout the talk were the timescales involved; the Russian order took about a year from start to completion. An important element that Michael stressed, throughout, were the regulations involved in ensuring that the cloth met the required standards and the penalties involved if they were not.

Space sustainability - Oct 21st 2024

The topic of the second of the 2024-2025 season of talks was entitled Space sustainability and safety and protection of the environment. The above graphic shows the plethora of space junk that is in orbit around the Earth. The single white trajectory is that of the International Space Station (ISS) and, as can be seen, there is a distinct possibility of the ISS intercepting some of it. As our speaker, Julie Black, indicated this diagram very much over exaggerates the possibility but it is still worryingly large.

Julie, currently Director of Space Sustainability and safety and protection for the environment for the UK government, opened her talk by saying that in the early days of space exploration and utilisation little thought was given to the idea of the threats posed by life expired objects in orbit. In particular the fact that all satellites in the general sense will eventually return to the Earth and either burn up on re-entry or impact the its surface. In either case, especially with some of the early devices, life harmful materials could be released. An example of this is that some of the early test vehicles had primary energy sources that were nuclear powered.

As Julie explained, ideally, all these non-functioning objects ought to be either repurposed or removed from orbit and all new orbiting objects must be designed to have a clean extinction once their functionality ceased. To be able to achieve this all the objects have to be identified and their orbital trajectories determined. In terms of tracking she indicated that the UK contributed significantly to the global systems in place to do this and that she was confident that all man made objects over 0.01m in size were known about. She then went on to tell us that, despite many clever ideas some of which described, not much progress had been made in the area of repurposing or object removal.

She concluded her talk by staging an interesting interactive audience debate around many of the topics raised. The discussion ranged from the ethical considerations involved in some of the possible methods to the economic constraints that made some of the suggested processes virtually impossible to initiate.

AI techniques at air interfaces - Nov 4th 2024

Speaking to a combined live/zoom audience, Paul Harris a leading consultant with Abbey Solutions, opened his talk by setting the context of his presentation; the ground work for 6G communications networks which were expected to be released by about 2030. In particular, he said he would concentrate on how and where artificial intelligence(AI)/machine learning(ML) could be used to in the setting up of standards in this system.

To illustrate the problems that Paul and his group had been tackling he told us about the work they had done on improving the characterisation of the radio channel between transmitter and receiver using AI/ML in the context of 5G. The nature of this channel is shown in the above diagram; some elements are static such as reflections of buildings but others are dynamic. For example, refracted rays from rain clouds. He also pointed out that no two base stations are identical. Paul indicated that his group had employed neural networks, to improve transmission beam choice. He stressed the importance of employing an appropriate set of training/testing data.

In the second half of his talk, Paul outlined where AI could be used to advantage in redesigning some of the sub-elements in both the transmitter and receiver blocks in the context of 6G. After describing how in principle. if then appropriate training data is available, it might just be possible to use AI to design a complete transmitter/receiver pairing for a given channel. However the problem lies with having the correct data and computing power to deal with the ensuing complexity. Paul thought that this was perhaps a step too far. His approach is to concentrate on looking at sub-blocks where significant gains can be made. He told us about some work that had been done on units within the receiver block where it is thought that the Channel Estimation, Equalisation and Symbol Demapping sub-units can be replaced by a single implementable block.

The session concluded with a lively Q&A; topics ranging from the importance of reliable training/testing data to the very fundamental one of why is a lot of effort being put into 6G when 5G is still very limited in its coverage and uptake.