Dr Richard Lock, a Chartered Engineer with the IMechE, has joined us this month bringing a diverse range of experience from an array of industries.

Richard completed his doctorate at the university of Bristol and whilst there worked with the British Cycling track bikes ahead of the 2016 olympics in Rio. He then joined Frazer-Nash Consultancy. While there he gained technical and project management experience working in the Defence and Nuclear sectors, with involvment in initial requirements capture through to detailed design phases.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis continues to grow and is proving popular with our existing customers. Modelling complex fluid flows to minimise wakes and ensuring the quality of fluid presentation to downstream components is proving to be very active at present. Our customers like being able to resource this aspect of analysis, alongside our 3D CAD design and structural analysis activities. This is helping to reduce design iteration cycles by being able to perform all analysis and design activities under one roof.

This area of our business remains highly active in two main fields, the development of future combustion assembly test equipment and the development of future large scale civil aero engine test equipment. Two of our key staff are now fully integrated into our two teams as design project managers. Dharam Randhawa is looking after large aero-engine test support equipment. Daniel Green is looking after future combustion test equipment design.

Our expertise in composites and fluid structure interaction are proving vital for our work on composite marine structures. Our CFD capabilities coupled with extensive composite design and analysis experience are allowing optimal solutions to be obtained fast! We are developing close links with a fuild dyamics test house to allow us to calibrate physically our models – see our next newsletter for more on this area of growth.

Removing weight (using FEA analysis) along with the provision of high integrity structures is the name of the game here. From the design of large scale aero-engine composite intakes, loaded with instrumentation to the design of highly loaded submarine structures continues to grow. Matthew Jeffreys, our Divisional Head of Composites continues to add high tech methods, gained from his days in formula 1 design to our aerospace and marine composites activities.

Matthew Jeffreys, our Divisional Head of Composite structures, will be giving a talk at the Advanced Engineering show at the NEC (Birmingham) on the Wednesday the 30th of October. Please do drop by to gain an insight into how we are combining fluid loading with the design of composite structures. Matthew also brings the cross fertilisation of advanced techniques from Formula 1 into our aerospace, marine & defence composite business.