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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.
Stuart Catchpole of Space East opened his talk by explaining what Space East is and how it came to be. It is one of the regional clusters that was envisaged when the UK government set out in its strategy for the Space Economy in 2021. There are 14 such clusters; some university based and some regional. Space East is based in Ipswich and is hosted by Suffolk County Council but its remit covers the whole of East Anglia. The idea of a cluster is that it tries to maximise the local potential in the space technology in the region. The UK Space Agency has also designed the clusters so that they can also work together if so required. Stuart then went on to talk about some of the major projects being developed in East Anglia. He indicated that the projects could roughly be split into two groups; inserting satellites into appropriate orbits and secondly using them to perform specific tasks.
One such area is in satellite technology. One such example was that of a Cambridge based company that is developing an infra red telescope that will be used to scan the earth surface via low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. This is potentially of great interest to the agricultural industry. For example these systems can be used to detect the early onset of heat stress in crops and the need for irrigation. And of course, the security and defence organisations are very interested in the technology, because of the low latency of LEO orbits motion, object movement can be detected even in adverse conditions such as smokey or foggy conditions.
Another big user of satellites in East Anglia are marine agencies, such as the Centre of Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science(CEFAS), based at Lowestoft. CEFAS use remote sensing to monitor fish stocks and marine blooms particularly if these are linked to drinking water supplies.
Another project that Stuart talked about was a Norfolk based company that was using satellite technology to extend the conventional line of sight control to enable their machines to fly much further so that they can be used to monitor the behaviour of marine wind farms and instigate robotic repair if required.
A very important part of many space applications is the need for high spec high reliability cameras. Stuart told us about Teledyne, a Chelmsford based company, who have been involved for the past couple of decades in designing and manufacturing space cameras including those on the Hubble and James Webb satellites. They are at the forefront of the development of state of the art new cameras.
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!