Institution Chief Executive Stephen Tetlow hosted seven graduate engineers from Jaguar Land Rover, architects Sadler Brown and building services experts Buro Happold, to broaden their perspectives and encourage cross-fertilisation between industry sectors, at a recent event at One Birdcage Walk, London.
Being out of their everyday working environments meant the engineers had a chance to use their creativity and enhance their knowledge in a different way.
First stop was the Palace of Westminster, where engineers saw the lavish, public rooms and heard about the constant restoration necessary to keep the Palace functioning efficiently as a modern day workplace. David Kingstone from Buro Happold took them behind the scenes to see the heating and ventilation systems, and the renovation project that is going on. Colin Barrington, from Climate Control Systems at JLR remarked on the challenge of recirculating air around a complex building of many rooms, compared with a car.
The engineers, who are working towards being chartered, then had a tour of One Birdcage Walk. Many of them had seen Institution membership as a step towards becoming chartered, a means of accreditation and the source of their monthly magazine. They were pleasantly surprised and motivated by the support shown to them, and by the range of benefits open to members from the library service, to working space in London and meeting rooms for their use.
A brainstorming and knowledge exchange session was the highlight of the day. Sadler Brown and Buro Happold are jointly tackling a ground breaking design project for residential dwellings in an area of outstanding natural beauty. Stephen Tetlow, the Institution’s Chief Executive, had suggested to Jo Lopes, Head of Technical Excellence at JLR, that the young engineers from JLR could help tackle the challenges of this project.
Kevin Brown, of Sadler Brown, briefed the engineers on the constraints they were facing. The building was to be energy neutral, highly innovative and leave the meadow of rare flora and fauna intact. Solar panels will be installed but there are issues around energy storage to meet peak demand. JLR engineers discussed using hydrogen, fuel cells, fly wheels and, most practically, a water battery. The proposed site has a slope, potentially allowing water to be pumped up during the day and returned downhill via a turbine when needed. However, back-of-envelope sums during a coffee break, showed that water storage tanks equal to 16 petrol tankers would be needed to generate a useful 1kW for 6 hours!
Davood Bonyad, a product development engineer, recognised a problem common to both industries, that of overheating by sunlight through glass. The automotive industry is researching “smart glass” for roofs of vehicles, which can change its transmission properties when a voltage is applied. This could potentially be employed in buildings as well. Similarly technologies on pollution, and particularly pollen sensors, were of interest.
“When making a car you need to design it, test it and then manufacture it, so we applied this to the house,” describes Dave Thomason, a powertrain engineer. Design focused on a centralised control system for all aspects of the house, which could work remotely and even charge your electric car! Testing threw up suggestions of thermodynamic modelling and computational fluid dynamics to predict airflow and heat flow. Manufacturing the house offsite and having really lean assembly could minimise build time, the ecological impact, as well as time and expense.
Kevin Brown noticed that “the engineers brought another perspective to the project and a range of interesting ideas that need to be explored further, in particular pre-fabrication and the use of various means of energy storage”. Whilst automotive engineers are striving to reduce mass, every gram counts, the building architects were looking to increase thermal mass to reduce temperature variations. However there was common ground on the balance between aesthetics (the designers) and functionality (the engineers), and the drive to innovate.
A chance for bright young engineers to flex their creativity in an unfamiliar field was stimulating and exciting. Jo Lopes reflected that it “helped the engineers demonstrate their contribution to engineering outside their area of expertise”, which is part of achieving Charted status. David Kingstone found it interesting to see the similarities between the building and automotive industries, and how useful the cross-fertilisation of ideas is.
The final word should go to the instigator of the day Stephen Tetlow who thanked Jo Lopes and JLR for their involvement: “I was really uplifted by the JLR graduate professional engineers and their entire approach. With a team like them in your company one can be nothing but hugely optimistic about the future!”