• Question: What is the most challenging engineering project that you have been involved with during the past year?

    Asked by join022gas to Tom, Sanjeev, Orla, Fiona, Eimear, Cillian on 2 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Fiona Malone

      Fiona Malone answered on 2 Mar 2020:

      The last robot I had to build had to mimic a human oesophagus (food tube) and the swallowing motion called peristalsis. The huamn oesophagus works by squeezing the food to the stomach, kind of like squeezing toothpast from a tube of toothpaste. This was a very difficult motion to replicate and to make the materials move in the way a human oesophagus does. It took a lot of practice and a LOT of experimentation.

    • Photo: Eimear O'Hara

      Eimear O'Hara answered on 2 Mar 2020:

      Definitely the project I’m working on now, where I’m trying to design a new shoulder implant, as well as doing all my own prototyping and mechanical testing. 3D printing with metal is a lot more complicated than the desktop printers with plastic – I have to put on steel toe boots, a full body suit and a face mask just to go into the room with the printer because the powder that’s used is very dangerous to breathe in. Since it’s a new design there’s lots of trial and error to find something that works!

    • Photo: Tom Hodgkinson

      Tom Hodgkinson answered on 2 Mar 2020:

      I was involved in a project that used a special machine to give nano-sized kicks to stem cells make them become bone cells to help them regrow bone after being seriously injured. The tiny size of the kicks (about 3500 times thinner than a piece of paper) meant that checking we were kicking the cells enough and measuring how they changed was very difficult.

    • Photo: Orla McGee

      Orla McGee answered on 3 Mar 2020:

      Recently, I’ve been working on making a 3D printed a metal stent (a device used to open arteries that are struggling to let blood flow through them) that is quite flexible. Usually, 3D parts are quite stiff so trying to make one that is flexible and require a lot of design changes and overcoming a lot of challenges that arose due to the 3D printing process.
      I only got the new flexible stents successfully printed last week so I’m very proud of that work.

    • Photo: Cillian Thompson

      Cillian Thompson answered on 5 Mar 2020:

      Probably the one I am involved in now because there is a lot of work to do. I have to make a specific material for the 3D printer and then be able to use that material to print a screw or a plate for bones. This means that whatever I print with the new material it has to be strong enough to last 6 months in the body and then disappear after it heals the bone.

    • Photo: Sanjeev Kumar

      Sanjeev Kumar answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      Recently, I was involved in the development of a wristwatch-based sensor device for wireless health monitoring of patients. The developed device was successfully implemented to monitor the health parameters (such as body temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat, blood oxygen level, etc.) of the patients wirelessly.

      The main challenge with this project was to improve the wireless communication range of the device and make sure that the device measures the health parameters accurately.

      I started working on this project in March 2018 and finished in Sept. 2019. So in total, it took me about 18 months to develop the final product and evaluate the wireless performance of the device in a hospital.

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