ACADEMIC LECTURE BY PROFESSOR PETER IRELAND
On the 17th October 2017, we arrived at the Osney Thermofluids Research Laboratory, University of Oxford to attend an academic lecture by Professor Peter Ireland who was once the supervisor for our lecturer Professor Ir. Dr. Abdul Rahim Talib.
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Professor Peter Ireland holds the Donald Schultz Chair in Turbomachinery and is the Head of the Osney Thermo-Fluids Laboratory. He has dedicated his career to researching the technologies used to cool systems for aircraft propulsion and power generation and now leads a broad portfolio of research programmes ranging from turbine cooling to hypersonic flow. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the UK Corporate Specialist in Heat Transfer at Rolls-Royce where he held the senior heat transfer specialist role for projects involving turbines, fuel cells, nuclear power, fire modelling, manufacture, instrumentation, heat exchangers, power electronic cooling and combustion.
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Upon our arrival at the Osney Thermo-Fluids laboratory, we were brought to the meeting room while waiting for Professor Peter Ireland. He greeted us so warmly that we couldn’t help but feel welcome. He started with a little bit of introduction about the background of the University of Oxford, where the University itself is situated in the city of Oxford, which lies about 60 miles (90 km) north-west of London. The number of intake students each year is quite small compared to other universities. Briefly he also talked about his field of interest which is turbine engine spefically focusing on the use of temperature sensitive liquid crystals (Ireland and Jones, 2000) in heat transfer experiments. The technique is now used by 80% of the major aero-engine manufacturers in their research and/or evaluation of new turbine blade cooling systems. The transient method of measuring heat transfer using liquid crystals significantly improves the accuracy of the blade cooling designs.
After the talked, we were brought to visit the Osney Thermo-Fluids laboratory where they conducted most of the research and experiment. The Osney Thermo-Fluids lab work closely with the Rolls-Royce company regarding the turbine engine. There were some students and postdoctoral researchers conducting experiment and they also gave us a short briefing on what there are currently working on. The lab houses some of the most sophisticated turbine and high speed flow facilities in the UK, and the research group includes internationally recognised experts in CFD, flow and heat transfer experiments and instrumentation. It was really a privileged to be given the chances to visit the Osney Thermo-Fluids and getting to meet up with Professor Peter Ireland himself despite his busy schedule to entertained us.
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ACADEMIC LECTURE BY PROFESSOR JIN-CHONG TAN AND VISIT TO DEPARTMENT OF ENGINEERING SCIENCE
As scheduled, we met up with Professor Jin-Chong Tan, the Associate Professor in Solid Mechanics & materials engineering around 2.30 pm for a visit to the department of Engineering Science. We started of the session with a bit of background about him. He’s from Malaysia but was working with the University of Cambridge, but now has been transferred to the University of Oxford. His field of interests would be Nanomechanical characterisation utilising nanoindentation and atomic force microscopy (AFM), Nanocomposites – processing, characterisation, and novel applications, Highly porous materials, including MOFs, fibre networks and foams just to name a few. For this session he shared with us a little bit about his current research program which is regarding the engineering of porous materials: From Macro- to Nano-scale. Since we are all aerospace engineering students, one of the topics that caught our interest is about the gas turbine Aero-engine Noise Sources. Some research has been done with the materials and the design of the turbine engine itself to help in reducing the jet noise which contribute to the noise pollution. The current techniques for instance is the chevrons have been contributing in reducing the noise of approximately 1-3 dB reduction. Chevrons which were actually a sawtooth patterns on the exhaust nozzles on Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 and General Electric Genx engines, which are used on the Boeing 787.
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Before bringing us around the department of Engineering Science for a short tour, Professor Jin-Chong Tan talks a little bit of background about the department eventhough he’s quite new there. There are about 160 undergraduates admitted per year onto the four-year programme in Engineering Science, leading to the degree of Master of Engineering. From the outset practical work, including design, is given a high profile and the Department's exceptionally extensive links with industry ensure continuing relevance. The quality and aptitude of their graduates makes them highly sought after, both within the profession and elsewhere.
The first two years of the four-year MEng programme are devoted to topics which they believe all Engineering undergraduates should study. For their third and fourth years there is scope for specialisation into one of six branches of engineering: Biomedical, Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Information and Mechanical. Decisions about which of these will be their specialisation and can be deferred until their third year.
