This is probably not the ideal way to celebrate becoming a Dr of engineering, I’m sat in my hotel room Denmark, drinking a glass of red wine and, well, rather obviously writing my blog for the first time in absolutely ages. 

I guess in a lot of ways it is rather liberating, as the only reason I haven’t managed to write my blog for ages is because I have been sorting my corrections my second journal paper and the minor corrections for my PhD thesis.  Finding time to get those things sorted outside of working full time has been challenging.  It has certainly made me gain a huge amount of respect for anyone who studies at the same time as working.

So now I’m free – why the hotel room?  Well I’m a wind turbine engineer working for a company called Vestas.  They are the largest manufacturer of wind turbines in the world and they are based in Denmark.  As there are 13,500 people working for the company, however, a lot of us live outside Denmark.  I live in Surrey and work in a small office in Leatherhead, which means that every 2 or 3 weeks I travel to get help and share what I’ve been doing with my colleagues in Denmark. 

Today I’ve been working out how we can improve the way we make sure the noise that wind turbines produce is always low enough that we don’t disturb anyone.  Did you know that we can make our turbines quieter at night, so we are certain that our neighbours never get are never disturbed from their sleep?  It means the turbines produce a little less power, but by making sure we are even quieter at night than during the day we can construct turbines closer to houses and so produce more renewable energy.  

Travelling isn’t so bad, my glass of wine and nice hotel room is all paid for by Vestas and I know I’ll have plenty of time to celebrate properly when I get back home.   In fact I think I’ll start planning the celebration right now…

First of all thank you to everyone I met at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Sunday.  I really enjoyed showing you all my renewable energy gadgets and I hope I’ve inspired you to try some of them out yourself.

I promised that I would write down how to make a fruit clock on the Noisemakers website.  So here it is……

How to make a fruit clock

Things you will need:

2 - lemons

2 - 1pence or 2pence coins

2 - silver coloured screws or large (4-5cm) nails as these will hopefully be covered in zinc

An old digital watch or a small digital travel clock with the back taken off so you can get to the electric circuit

3 - 10cm lengths of copper wire (or you can splash out on some wire with crocodile clips on the end like I used at the science festival)

Good places to buy the wire and clock

Maplin (that’s where my crocodile clips came from)

Local model shops (they often sell remote controlled boats and aeroplanes)

How to make it

1) Push one of the pennies just over half of it is in one of the lemons

2) Push one of the nails or screws into the other side of the lemon.  It is important that the penny and nail/screw do not touch

3) Repeat steps 1) and 2) with the other lemon, penny and screw/nail

4) If you are using normal insulated copper wire remove the insulation at the each end of the pieces of wire so you can touch the copper against the penny and screw

5) Join the penny in one lemon to the screw in the other lemon with one of the pieces of wire.  If you are using copper wire, you can wrap around the wire on the screw and you can tape the wire to the penny

6) Join the other penny to one of the electrical connections (or wires) of the digital clock by twisting the wire around the connector or taping it.

7) Join the other screw to the electrical connection (or wire) of the digital clock that is not connect to the penny.  This should make a circuit so the wires travel around from clock to penny to screw to penny to screw to clock

YOUR CLOCK SHOULD NOW WORK

What if it doesn’t work yet?

1) Check all your connections

2) Move the pennies and screws closer together in the lemons – but make sure they still don’t touch

3) Squeeze the lemons to make sure they're not dried up (juice should come out)

Why it works

The acid of the lemon juice reacts with the copper and zinc (which are both types of metal) on the outside of the penny and screw. These reactions cause the penny to loose electrons (negatively charged particles) and the screw to gain electrons.  This means the penny becomes positively charged (like the knobbly end of an AA battery) and the screw becomes negatively changed (like the flat end of an AA battery).  The electrons floating around in the lemon then get attracted to the penny and start to flow around the electric circuit, which means that there is electricity to make the clock work.

Getting technical

The technical term for the lemon juice is an electrolyte, meaning a liquid that allows electric current can flow through it.

The scientific word for the penny and screw is that they are the electrodes of the battery meaning that they transfer electrons through the lemon and into the electric circuit.

I know at first glance my decision to start working for a wind turbine manufacturer after 10 years studying aerospace engineering seems totally strange, especially when I was offered jobs working as a gas turbine engineer after my PhD.  The change has, however, made me feel much happier about my work and I know it sounds very high and mighty, but it also make me feel like I have a worth.  You see the reason I chose engineering as a career was because I wanted to make life better for people.  I didn’t ever plan to design a bomb neutraliser or anything like that and I always knew I’d be part of a much bigger team, but I always wanted to help make things that would make life easier for the people using them.

I guess that’s why my ramjet engine project interested me.  The thought of helping people fly to from the UK to Australia in 3 hours seemed a great way to help people see friends and loved ones more easily.

The trouble was that during my PhD, it becomes more and more clear that there was no point helping people fly faster across the Earth if parts of Australia become too hot for humans and wildlife to live and parts of the UK disappear under the sea.     

As the science behind human induced climate change has strengthened, so has my feeling that I’m duty bound to use my engineering skills to try to slow the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  I thought about staying in the aerospace industry and trying to make engines more environmentally friendly, but it seemed that the carbon dioxide reductions being aimed for were too small to make a real impact on global warming and I couldn’t hear any whisper of a hydrogen engine or some other great technological leap forward.

Yesterday I went to a parliamentary reception at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) headquarters, which is on Birdcage Walk, right near Parliament Square and Horse Guards Parade in London.  I was there because I drive in Eco-marathon competitions as part of Team Green (http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ensajg/tg/index.htm).  The aim of the Eco-marathon competitions is to drive a specially designed car 10 miles around a race track using as little fuel as possible.  The cars have to go an average of 15 miles per hour and look amazingly sleek and small as they are designed specifically for the competition and don’t have to be road worthy.  At the end of the 10 miles, the amount of fuel used is extrapolated into an equivalent miles per gallon (mpg) and the car that achieves the highest miles per gallon wins.  Team Green currently holds the British Record for the most fuel efficient petrol car after it achieved 6603mpg at the Scottish Eco-marathon 2 years ago. 

I know it sounds like I’m always hobnobbing with MPs after meeting Tony Blair about a month ago, but actually these 2 events are my only brush with parliament and I knew nothing about parliamentary receptions until I spoke to some of MPs last night.  It turns out that lobby groups and institutions run parliamentary reception all the time and MPs will typically be invited to 10 or more each night!  The trick, to getting MPs along is to put on something a bit different that will interest the MPs, so that they aren’t just talking other MPs and civil servants over glasses of wine and nibbles.

What the IMechE did was invite lots of companies and universities to put up stands and exhibits, so that the MPs, peers and other engineers could wander around (with their wine and nibbles) and talk to us “real” engineers about what we do.  The idea was to raise the profile of engineering in the minds of MPs, so that issues like improving maths and physics teaching and getting more people to enter engineering careers in Britain might be better addressed in the future. 

I have to say that I was keen to go to the reception just for the experience and expected to mainly be standing around, hopefully with a glass of wine if I was lucky.  It turned out, however, to be an incredibly interesting evening and actually much more profitable than the reception at No. 10.  The MPs were generally interested in the car, but also really did want to talk about renewable energy and engineering in general.  The best bit for me was getting the opportunity to talk about my opinion that Britain is loosing the opportunity to cash in on tidal energy, just as we did with wind turbine energy.  It seems to me that we are doing extremely well at producing good tidal power designs and prototyping them, but, like wind turbines the small companies producing these prototypes can’t find the investment to go the next step to selling their designs globally. 

I was very impressed with the Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland called Alistair Carmichael.  He is very knowledgeable about renewable energy and extremely keen for the Scotland to produce as much energy as possible using tidal, wave and wind.  We talked about the fact that currently, the further electricity must be transmitted through the national grid, the more the electricity producers are charged per unit of energy they send.  This reduces the economic viability of renewable energy produced in the highlands, which is really bad news for increasing the amount of electricity produced in Britain using clean energy.

I have to say that I got the feeling that if you talk directly to your local MP they will be willing to listen and that most MPs want to please their constituents.  A lot of the MPs were at the reception because they had been invited by a constituent and I have to say that I was a bit annoyed with myself that I hadn’t invited my MP – Frank Dobson.  I would really like to be involved in similar engineering events in the future as I can see that they are great opportunity to express your views and ideas to people who could actually take them forward and make a difference.