Rockets, artificial hearts, a Mars rover, and vehicles including boats, jet-powered aircraft, cars and motorcycles were among the creations on display at the recent
University of Bath’s 60th Engineering Design and Project Exhibition, which highlighted final year, individual and group design projects of students in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Electronic and Electrical Engineering and showed the range of challenges Bath student projects seek to solve. These covered from declining numbers of pollinators to drug delivery and sustainable urban mobility.
The exhibition’s Joseph Black keynote lecture (Joseph Black was a founding member of the university) was delivered by Bath graduates Navjot Sawhney and Hélène Verhaeghe. Mr Sawhney, founder and design engineer of the social enterprise ‘The Washing Machine Project’, founded this in 2019 while pursuing a Master’s in ‘Humanitarianism, Conflict and Development’ at the university, following a visit to India and seeing the amount of time and effort spent washing clothes.
He subsequently developed the Divya — a flat-packed hand-operated washing machine. Now working with partners including the UNHCR, Oxfam, and the Whirlpool Foundation, The Washing Machine Project has distributed Divya washing machines to 15 countries and ‘impacted more than 46,000 lives’.
Solving real-world problemsMr Sawhney said: “It is quite emotional to come back to where this journey started. Bath was crucial in helping me to develop The Washing Machine Project and work out how we could help alleviate the burden of hand washing clothes that 60% of people around the world face, a burden that predominantly affects women and girls. We will soon be building machines in India, as well as in the UK and the USA and hope the project’s story inspires students to use their skills to solve real-world problems and shows where engineering can take you.”
The Faculty of Engineering and Design is home to 13 teams. These include Team Bath Heart, creators of a total artificial heart and twice champions of the
World Heart Hackathon. Also,
Team Bath Racing Electric, which builds and races a battery-powered racing car each year in
Formula Student events around Europe.
Other teams included: Team Bath Autonomous Sailing (developing autonomous sailing vessels capable of producing sustainable energy); Bath Biodevices without Borders (producing water-quality testing devices); Team Bath Human Powered (creating a competitive recumbent bicycle for women); and Team Bath Hydrobotics (which is creating remote-operated underwater vehicles). Also, Bath Rocket Team, Bath Hydrogen, Green Bath Racing, Bath TT Zero, Team Bath Drones, Team Bath Roving, and Machcelerate (which is aiming to create the world’s fastest jet-powered model aircraft).
Wera Hobhouse, MP for Bath, who attended the exhibition and presented a prize to Team Bath Heart, said: “I commend the Faculty of Engineering and Design for its world-beating work to create meaningful change, which was demonstrated so well through the
Engineering Design and Project Exhibition. In a world facing immense challenges, from the climate crisis to inequality, it is up to all of us to problem-solve our way out of it, and it is fantastic to see our very own engineers from the university leading the way.”