Hudds professor to chair IMechE Railway Division
Hands-on professor - Professor Simon Iwnicki, the new chair of the Institution of Mechanical Engineering's Railway Division
Wed, 23 Apr 2014 11:24:00 BST
Professor Simon Iwnicki’s theme for his tenure will be to address the skills shortage in railway engineering
THE University of Huddersfield’s Professor Simon Iwnicki (pictured) is to chair the Railway Division of the world’s most eminent engineering organisation and his mission will be to close a serious skills gap faced by the profession.
Professor Iwnicki heads the expanding Institute of Railway Research (IRR), based at the University, which will soon be the home for the £20 million Centre for Innovation in Rail. It has a multi-national team of researchers who take part in major projects worldwide. They are ensuring the future for a mode of transport pioneered in Britain during the 1800s, a period which saw the launch of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE). Its first president was rail pioneer George Stephenson.
The IMechE has a long-established Railway Division and in June, Professor Iwnicki – currently deputy chairman – begins his year of office as its chairman.
“My theme for the year will be education of the next generation of engineers,” he said. “This issue is becoming really important to engineering, especially railway engineering. There is a tremendous skills shortage and we at the IMechE need to try to address that.”
Railway Challenge
One important innovation – in which Professor Iwnicki has played a central part – is the IMechE’s Railway Challenge, in which teams of students design and build a small-scale locomotive, addressing specific technical problems. In 2013, the University of Huddersfield itself won the contest, with its energy-efficient loco, coming up against other universities at Stapleford Miniature Railway in Leicestershire. The challenge takes place again this year, with new teams joining in.
“This year the challenge is make a locomotive that is as quiet as possible and ours is actually rather noisy! So the students are working on a silencer to get the noise down as low as possible,” said Professor Iwnicki, who expects the competition to be especially tough. A team of 16 Huddersfield students – mainly in the final years of their degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering – will enter the Railway Challenge, which takes place in June.
Also in July, the University of Huddersfield is to host a residential course that will introduce year 11-12 school pupils to new rail technologies. The event is organised in tandem with the Smallpeice Trust, an educational charity that runs science, technology, engineering and maths activities and engineering courses and it will include a team competition to design and build railway vehicles and to see which performs best on the test track that has been laid at the University.
There is also to be a new MSc course in rail engineering at the University of Huddersfield, and the railway industry has provided £40,000 of funding to produce an educational video that will focus on the careers of six young people working in railway engineering.
The film will be shown at all 39 universities who are now members of Rail Research UK Association (RRUKA), a growing organisation of which Professor Iwnicki is Academic Co-Chair.
