On a mostly sunny Saturday 17^th and Sunday 18^th June an excited and enthusiastic team including several UG and Composites Cosem CDT students, numerous researchers, two Professors and a Project Manager delivered a hugely popular composites-focused interactive stand at the BNHC organised Festival of Nature “Wild Weekend”.

An incredibly busy Millennium Square, checkered with multiple marquees, became the hub of many fascinating nature-related discoveries. Large numbers of people attended the two-day event, from all walks of life to engage with the different activities.

The NextCOMP “Woodpeckers and Wind Turbines: How nature inspires novel materials” stand attracted a lot of attention, with visitors keen to uncover facts about and vote for their favourite “Composite Creatures” (Spoiler: it was the armadillo).  Visitors enjoyed interacting with artefacts such as bamboo, shells, and natural fibres as well as some manmade carbon fibres and plies.  A timeline of composites through the ages introduced visitors to the many ways humans have been harnessing the power of composites since their inception to their multiple uses in society today.

The “NextCOMP Crusher” was in constant use, with visitors all vying to create the strongest composite they could make from a jelly beam and using just two strands of pasta for reinforcement.  Once constructed, attendees of all ages tested their jelly/pasta composite by applying weights until failure.  This year’s Festival of Nature saw the record broken, with a massive 1kg being achieved!

Supported by our fantastic University of Bristol Public Engagement colleagues, it was a brilliant opportunity to meet and converse with curious and engaged local people.

NextCOMP’s Prof Richard Trask said “What an amazing positive outreach event to engage with all ages. The Festival of Nature brings wonderful conversations around the benefits of fibre reinforced composites for society now and what we need to do for a more sustainable future. Who can resist the composite crusher – a simple test, and yet both the ‘established’ and ‘budding’ engineers and scientists are all vying to do the impossible… create a structural composite from jelly and spaghetti! Cracking fun.”

Team members involved were: Cameron Woodgate, Lucas Lu, Joe Rifai, Bohao Zhang, Ian Lee, Laura Pickard, Aree Tongloet, Xun Wu, Jo Gildersleve, Ian Hamerton and Richard Trask.

NextCOMP is an EPSRC funded Programme Grant UKRI EPSRC EP/T011653/1 and for more details of the Programme and the other activities the team get involved in see the NextCOMP website

The ACCIS/CoSEM CDT hosted a STEM Outreach Day for a group of 50 Sixth-Form pupils from Katharine Lady Berkeley’s School on Thursday, 18^th May. Led entirely by the current CDT students, there were four activities that ran throughout the day in rotation. To start the day, there was an introduction to the University and Composite Engineering given from Professor Ian Hamerton in the Small Lecture Theatre. This was then followed by a mini-lecture presented by CDT18 student, Rafael Heeb, on an Introduction to Aeronautics. Then, CDT20 student, Meiran Abdo shared about his current research project in recycling wind blade waste material.

The group then went down to the General Engineering Lab for a variety of hands-on and engaging activities. One activity, created by Dr. Ben Woods, was the creation of an aeroplane wing. This required students in small groups to make important decisions to craft a wing that took into consideration aerodynamics and the lift/drag ratio.

The ‘winning’ designs were celebrated after each wing was tested for performance. The pupils also utilised the NextCOMP Crushers, generously supported by the NextCOMP team. Using jelly and dried pasta, the pupils were tasked with creating a sample that could withstand the most weight. The pupils also used the pillar drills and laser cutter to create keychains that they could take home with them. Each pupil was also given the opportunity to spend time on the flight simulator, which was widely praised by the pupils.

As it was a beautiful day outside, the pupils enjoyed lunch at Royal Fort Gardens, before continuing the rotations in the Lab. It was a great day, with unanimously positive feedback from pupils and staff on the overall satisfaction of the day and the engagement of the CDT students.

Additional gratitude for the support to help run this day from Willow Gibson, Jo Gildersleve, Sophie Spence, Josh Hoole, Active Outreach, and the CDT Directors and Staff.

To mark the closure of the EPSRC funded SIMPROCS Platform grant at the Bristol Composites Institute, a dissemination event was held at the NCC on 20 April.

This was well attended by over 50 delegates who came to hear about the state-of-the-art composites manufacturing simulations that had been developed throughout the project.‌

 

 

‌A series of talks highlighted successful outcomes, such as over 20 published papers, international collaborations, new software developed and industrial deployment of new process modelling tools.
The event ended with a networking lunch and a display of posters about the research.

Prof. Stephen Hallett, the grant’s principal investigator, said “I am very proud of what we have achieved in this programme. It has‌ been a game changer in our ability to simulate composites manufacturing processes. The world‌-‌class team‌ of researchers have been amazing to work with and have delivered fantastic new capability.”

 

The slides from the day’s talks can be downloaded at the following links:

Introduction, grant overview, major successes – Stephen Hallett

Pre-preg and AFP process modelling – Jonathan Belnoue

Process Modelling of Textile Composites – Adam Thompson

Industrial use case – from CAD to defect free part – Yi Wang

Early stage new technology – Machine Learning – Anatoly Koptelov

And the posters can be downloaded here:

SIMPROCS – posters