Project Exhibition 2007

This year we again have to thank our sponsors, Sharp of Europe, Atkins, GlaxoSmithKline and QinetiQ for contributing £3000 of prize money between them, which enabled us to offer some worthwhile prizes. SOUE chipped in with a modest £200 (and the organisation). We had 24 entries, slightly less than the 29 last year, and everything fitted into LR3 (just), except for one (Michael Smith) which needed a projector and lots of space to view it, in LR2.

The £500 Sharp prize for an electronic exhibit went to Martin Evans of St John's for "Solar Sheep", which in fact is an autonomous lawnmower. An earlier stage of this had been exhibited last year, but Martin had made some interesting improvements to the infra-red navigation system.

The £500 Atkins prize for a civil/structural exhibit was awarded to Ed Crammond of Corpus for "Arbitrarily shaped particles in distinct element analysis". Put like that, it sounds a bit tedious, but his computer-generated display of oddly shaped bits somehow finding suitable places to tuck themselves into as they fell to the bottom of a bin was fascinating, anything but tedious.

The £400 QinetiQ prize for an "exhibit working towards an innovative solution of an important problem" went to Mike Wallace of Keble for "Product Design: a novel emergency drinking-water device", which used membranes and some clever chemical engineering to turn polluted water into something that could safely be drunk in emergencies.

For technical contribution

£250 to Alasdair Bell, Queens, for "Design of a hybrid rocket for satellite orbit injection", and

£250 to Nauman Shah, Exeter, for "Modelling multi-mode optical fibre networks"

For a good exhibit involving hardware

£200 to Michael Smith, Wadham, for "Prototype of a commercial system - reality racer"

For a good poster exhibit

£200 to Ned Gould, Christ Church, for "Offshore oil pipeline unburial"

For a materials exhibit

£200 to Felix Hofman, Trinity, for "Analysis of temporal and spatial temperature field evolution in metallic specimens"

For a historical study

£200 to Lucy Thomas, St John's, for "Stephenson's Britannia Bridge - an early box girder"

Commended

£100 to Charlie Briggs, Oriel, for "Electromagnetic detection of buried pipes"

£100 to Richard Harrap, Exeter, for "Environmental impacts of the Zenon and Kubota membranes for waste-water treatment"

£100 to Joshua Macabuag, Pembroke, for "Modelling and retro-fitting of non-engineered masonry under seismic loading"

£100 to Hugo Pillath, New College, for "Plywood reinforcement of timber gridshells"

£100 to Oliver Whyte, Wadham, for "Restoration and colourisation of video"

Mike Brownlow, Univ 1985-8, now with Sharp of Europe

Graham Hawkes, St Catherine's 1997-2001, now with Frazer-Nash

Gill Smith, Oriel 1996-2000, now with Atkins

Jonathan Snell, St John's 1998-2002, now with Instron