Mechanical Engineering with a Foundation Year - BEng (Hons)

[00:00:01] Speaker 1: Hello, my name is Olga.

[00:00:02] Speaker 2: And I'm Carlos. 

[00:00:03] Speaker 1: And we are both Engineering students here at BCU. And today we're going to take you on a tour in Millennium Point to all the engineering facilities.

[00:00:11] Speaker 2: Follow us.

[00:00:20] Speaker 1: Now we're on ground floor in the electronics lab, and this is where you can build circuits such as this one using these machines, you can control them and power them. So in your first year, you might end up doing a circuit like this, which is just the power on LED. And then you can go on using an oscilloscope to test sequences.

[00:00:39] Speaker 2: So now we're going to take you to the soldering lab. Anytime we need to do some soldiering on any type of projects, here is where we do them. Like Olga is doing right now, she is working on the micro mouse and with all the soldering for all the components. [00:00:57]

[00:01:00] Speaker 1: So this is where all the programming happens, such as coding and schematics and diagrams. All of this you'll be doing in this room. 

[00:01:12] Speaker 2: Welcome to our mechanical lab. This is where we test different materials on different bays for different applications, for things like their strength, versatility, and depending on which application, we have different machinery for it.

[00:01:26] Speaker 1: So we use microscopes to see the internal structures of materials, as you can see here. We do this to find how different structures behave under different conditions. So this is the workshop where we actually have real industrial machines here that are used from some of the parts for the projects we build. 

[00:01:45] Speaker 2: We do have industrial type machines capable of building engine parts like this one here. We are building a cylinder. 

[00:01:52] Speaker 1: Like this one here as well. This is a crank used in engines as well. It's really cool that we can use all of this machines just right here in our workshop.

[00:02:01] So this is another project that we built, and it's to test your knowledge on everything you've learned. And this is for the ball to stay on track at all times, even in this loop, as you can see here.

[00:02:09] This is the common area where you can come to either relax or catch up on your work as there's loads of seats and comfortable sofas.

[00:02:26] Speaker 1: So this is a hydraulics lab where you can do very interesting things like 3D printing, earthquake simulator and wind turbines. So these smaller 3D printers I used for reverse engineering and rapid prototyping. We can also use them to repair small things where we would ask students to design whatever parts broke and then we can 3D print it here so they can replace it on their project. In this room we actually have industrial level machines such as a metal 3D printer which can do something like this.

[00:02:56] Speaker 2: We also do various simulations here from a hydro station and also as you can see right next to me here, we do have a earthquake simulation running at the minute.

[00:03:09] So coming from our hydraulics lab, we are now in our civil lab. We test different types of soil, play around with it and try them out and develop new concrete as for example, here. 

[00:03:23] Speaker 1: So this is a biomedical lab where we test soils from different areas for pollution and soil health so we know if it's good for farming. 

[00:03:31] Speaker 2: So we are actually working with big names, big companies like Rivers Trust, and we are trying to develop new solutions for soil health. 

[00:03:40] Speaker 1: So this is the Formula student lab where we actually built a car that's going to go to Silverstone. 

[00:03:58] This is our engine test lab where we have an Audi, R8, E-TRON engine.

[00:04:03] Speaker 2: We also have a battery simulator in this room. We can actually do real life simulations of our engine, for example, in Silverstone, and see if we can actually complete the track and the times. 

[00:04:15] Thank you for watching our engineering facilities - I hope you enjoyed.

[00:04:18] Speaker 1: To find out more, you can come to one of our Open Days or you can visit the link below.