• Question: Tell me about the most challenging engineering project that you have been involved with during past year.

    Asked by Precious_Adeyemi to Lisa, Katie, David, Colin, Caoimhe on 9 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Colin Keogh

      Colin Keogh answered on 9 Nov 2014:

      All my 3d printing projects were very challenging. I only got into the 3d printing area about a year ago, so everything was new to me. 3d printing is also a very new technology so their are lots of problems with it. So the last year spent trying to build, maintain & repair the machines while pushing them as far a they will go (and beyond that) as been very challenging but very much worth it. I went from knowing nothing about 3d printing to leading my universities research activities in printing in less than 12 months.

    • Photo: Katie Mahon

      Katie Mahon answered on 9 Nov 2014:

      I had to design a large tank which had heating coils inside it to heat up the liquid inside the tank. We normally put coils outside the tank, so putting them inside with all the liquid was a new challenge. We had to think of all the heating coils expanding & shrinking when they got hot, because metal expands when its heated up. This meant all the supports holding the coils had to flex or slide to make sure they wouldn’t become weak & snap over time.

    • Photo: Lisa Phelan

      Lisa Phelan answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Working with a large team to get a drug eluting stent to the US market. The project is huge and getting a device commercial in the US is no small task, lots of testing the device on the bench in simulated heart models, drug delivery testing and lots and lots of paperwork.
      The project is still ongoing!

    • Photo: David Taylor

      David Taylor answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Last year I worked on a case in which a large storage tank suddenly exploded. It was about 30 metres high and 30 metres in diameter, and full of liquid, so as you can imagine it made a big mess! Luckily nobody was hurt.
      I had to do some quite complex engineering calculations to work out why the explosion occurred.

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