This online taster session will give you an insight into what it's like to study Mechanical Engineering at university. You'll have the chance to hear from one of our academics, participate in a taster lecture and engage with current undergraduates.
Sensing Sight with sound
In the pitch black, a bat speeds through the air and swoops around a tree to eat a tasty insect
snack. Bats avoid trees and find snacks just by using sound. Scientists have taken this further
and are using sound to detect flaws in the ancient UK sewage system! We are now designing a
swarm of small robots that use sound to detect cracks and blocks in sewers. In this talk, you
will learn a physicist's approach to use sound, like a bat, to find things in the dark. Will you be
able to recognise the sound of a blocked sewer?
Maintaining the UK sewer system is a huge issue. Every time we suspect there is a major leak
we need to dig up large parts of our roads, causing traffic jams, air pollution from dust, and the
whole operation is very costly. To make matters worse, much of our sewers are ancient, falling
apart, and we have no idea what pipes are where. Not to mention that it is difficult to convince
people to go down there to inspect the sewers. How do we now maintain this ancient labyrinth?
A team, led by the University of Sheffield, have the answer: we will develop a swarm of small robots to swim through our sewers and detect cracks and blocks.
After presenting the application, I will pose the question: how do these little robots detect things in the dark? I will then show how, with a physics approach, we can break this problem down into simple manageable smaller problems. These small problems involve simple trigonometry
and the solution is illustrated with lots of videos from simulations. From there, we build back up to the complex problem.
The talk will involve lots of videos and have strong visual aids throughout. Videos will include bats flying around, sound sensors in pipes, and computer simulations. I will ask the audience to hear sounds and guess what they heard. Did the sound come from a blocked sewer or not? To finish we end with how machine learning is better at recognising sounds then we are.
When: Tuesday 14th May - 4pm - 5pm
Age Group: Year 12 and Year 13
Location: Online
Itinerary: 16:00 - 16:25 Sewer talk. Students vote on which sounds correspond to a block sewer.
16:25 - 16:35 Interactive exercise - “draw the lines of pressure"
16:35 - 16:40 Want to be an engineer?
16:40 - 17:00 Q&A with current undergraduate students
Please note that this is an approximate schedule and is therefore subject to change.