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.

Autonomous Ships

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.

Time - What is Time?

Richard Aldridge opened his presentation with a confession that in the process of developing this talk material he had become more confused about his understanding of what time is! Some of this was due to the problem of reconciling the quantum description of matter and that provided by the relativistic view and some of it came about from the use of the word time in everyday conversation.

The only way in which some of this confusion can be resolved is by looking at the way the concept of time has developed over the ages. Adopting this approach, the first part of the talk examined how early man observed the light levels varying due to the motions of the Sun during daytime, the Moon and stars at night and the tools that were used to make the measurements. Richard described early prehistoric monuments e.g. Stonehenge and their use in predicting seasons; of particular importance during the transformation of social groups from the hunter-gatherer life style to the farming mode. Our ancestors also developed various other time pieces that depended on material flows such as waterwheels and hourglasses as well as devices such as constant burn rate candles. Using these devices the basic units of time were defined such as the day, hour, minute and second.

During the Renaissance major developments in glass technology and knowledge from the Islamic world combined to bring much more accurate astronomical measurements. Together with improvements in pendulum clocks Kepler was able describe the motion of the planets around the Sun. This important development enabled Galileo and Newton to introduce the idea of a universal clock. Because of the way they introduced this idea of time it had a built in problem - reversibility of time. This ran counter to human experience of observable time running in one direction only i.e. from past to future. This view was backed up by all the work that was done in improving the design of machines particularly steam driven devices.

Some of the reversibility problem was removed when it was discovered that information could only travel at the speed of light and that whatever frame of reference the measurer was in the speed of light was the same value. Einstein pointed out in his general theory of relativity that because of these constraints there could be no such concept of universal time as conjectured by Newton.

As Richard pointed out in the last part of his talk, the quantum mechanical model (QMM) of matter differs from the Einstein approach (GR) in the way it handles time. It would appear that in the most recent form of QMM, time is an emergent quantity whereas it is a locally defined feature in GR. Only time will tell!!

Measurement

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!!

Manufacturing Textiles in 18th Century Norwich

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.