Principal Engineer Siddartha Khastgir, represented WMG at the Your Innovative Future event at Solihull College attended by around 500 school students (aged 11-18) from local schools.

Siddartha took part in a special Dragon’s Den style workshop at the event on 8 March. Various businesses went head-to-head pitching sustainable initiatives and products to groups of students. The students were the ‘Dragons’ and had up to £1 million (per team) to invest in the company that they believed delivered the pitch with the most sustainable ethos.

Siddartha pitched the concept of “The Driverless Future” and won an investment worth £7 million! Other businesses pitching included Jaguar Land Rover, Network Rail and Highways England.

Overall, students gained a greater understanding of the benefits and challenges faced by a ‘driverless future’ and how engineering is helping to overcome these challenges.

Siddartha said: “It was a unique experience and I was intrigued by the intelligent and thoughtful questions asked by the students. The dragons gave me a hard time for the £7million!”

Ford cars could be more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly, thanks to a new lightweight rear suspension component, designed by the award-winning Innovate UK project Composite Lightweight Automotive Suspension System (CLASS), involving WMG at the University of Warwick.

Led by Ford Motor Company, in partnership with WMG, Gestamp Chassis and GRM, the CLASS project consortium developed a new tieblade-knuckle for a Ford Class C vehicle, a key element for the car’s rear suspension.

An optimised design and manufacturing process developed by WMG enabled the researchers to replace the car’s current multiple-piece fabricated steel component with a single moulding - making a weight saving in excess of 4.5kg per vehicle, a 35% saving on the current part.

This will result in CO₂ savings over the lifetime of the vehicle, and the technology is appropriate for much wider vehicle chassis and body applications.

In March 2018, the CLASS project won a JEC Innovation Award, in the Automotive Innovation category.

Researchers at WMG carried out materials selection by moulding test plaques and measuring material performance characteristics. This was fed into the design of the part, carried out by Gestamp, before optimisation of the design, carried out by GRM.

WMG, at the University of Warwick, are the academic research leads in a new £2 million Innovate UK funded research programme that will help create new forms of technological assistance to help drivers to avoid collisions and accidents.

We are proud to announce that Professor Tony McNally has been selected by China’s Ministry of Education and State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs under Plan 111 as a Foreign Expert to advise in the manufacture and characterisation of functional composite materials.

China’s Plan 111 is jointly organised by the Ministry of Education and State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, P.R. China. It aims to gather groups of first-class minds from around the world to work with leading Chinese researchers on the creation of 100 dedicated innovation centres.

Over the next 5 years Professor McNally will be working in collaboration with the International Innovation Centre for Advanced Manufacturing proposed by the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology (BUCT).

Professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, founder and Chairman of WMG was delighted to welcome the Education Select Committee to WMG today (Monday 26th February).

Whilst at WMG, the Committee met with current students, studying on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, who were able to talk to them about teaching quality, tutor support, fees and how their degrees are helping them prepare for the world of work. They also met with students who are working and undertaking degree apprenticeships, paid for by their employers, and wanted to understand how their experiences differ to full-time students, and why they chose this route over a traditional university degree.

WMG Outreach team has been running a series of 3D printing workshops at St John’s Primary School in Kenilworth, working with year six pupils to design drip trays for ice lollies. The designs are being 3D printed and will be taken back to the school for the pupils to test. Real ice lollies, and a hair dryer to create the effect of a warm summer’s day, will be used to evaluate the performance of their designs.

Diane Burton organised the workshops along with Margaret Low, Kevin Couling, Nicole Jones, Valentina Donzella, Mairi McIntyre and Engineering Undergraduates, Hok Chui, Alice Davis, Kondkher Shabaab and Jake Saunders.

The youngsters worked in groups and used 3D printed models of popular ice lolly shapes to enable them to take measurements to develop their designs. They came up with some seriously creative designs, including drip trays to fit on the lolly stick, and drip trays with handles that the lolly stick sits inside. One design even had an angled straw hole for sucking up the tasty drips.

Electric vehicle charging infrastructure on UK roads is to be advanced, thanks to a new £5.6 million project – funded by Innovate UK – to develop Vehicle-2-Grid (V2G) technologies, involving WMG at the University of Warwick.

For three years from April 2018, the EV-elocity consortium will conduct a project to demonstrate and develop V2G technology across a variety of UK locations, including airports and business parks – with the aim of proving its viability and worth to business and the wider public.

Researchers at WMG, led by vehicle electrification and energy storage expert Dr James Marco, will build a techno-economic model of how V2G will be viable within the UK. A key innovation will be the inclusion of new models of battery degradation within the analysis that will underpin new methods to optimise the vehicle’s battery system.

Dr Marco’s team will also analyse real-world usage data from a range of different electric fleet vehicles as they are used within a V2G context.

The project will break new ground in helping consumers, businesses and infrastructure providers to financially benefit from adapting their charging behaviour and vehicle use.

In doing so, the project will help to further accelerate and incentivise the transition from traditional fuel sources to electric vehicles.

Professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, founder and Chairman of WMG was delighted to welcome Bernadette Kelly, the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Transport, to WMG today (Thursday 22^nd February).

Bernadette Kelly said ‘It was great to visit WMG and to hear directly from Lord Bhattacharyya about the huge range of its work across many sectors and technologies. The work WMG is doing on battery technology and smart and connected vehicles in particular is hugely important to the transport sector. My Department looks forward to working with the WMG and the region on the Future of Mobility, one of the Government’s Industrial Strategy Grand Challenges.’

Researchers at WMG at the University of Warwick have developed a new direct, precise test of Lithium-ion batteries’ internal temperatures and their electrodes potentials and found that the batteries can be safely charged up to five times faster than the current recommended charging limits. The new technology works in-situ during a battery’s normal operation without impeding its performance and it has been tested on standard commercially available batteries. Such new technology will enable advances in battery materials science, flexible battery charging rates, thermal and electrical engineering of new battery materials/technology and it has the potential to help the design of energy storage systems for high performance applications such as motor racing and grid balancing.

If a battery becomes over heated it risks severe damage particularly to its electrolyte and can even lead to dangerous situations where the electrolyte breaks down to form gases than are both flammable and cause significant pressure build up. Overcharging of the anode can lead to so much Lithium electroplating that it forms metallic dendrites and eventually pierce the separator causing an internal short circuit with the cathode and subsequent catastrophic failure.

WMG, at the University of Warwick, is a key partner in the Midlands site helping to deliver a £30 million project by Health Data Research UK, to address challenging UK healthcare issues using data science, which is looking at making game-changing improvements in people’s health by harnessing data science at scale across the UK.

WMG will be part of the “Midlands HDR UK Substantive Site”, which will tackle the challenge of how to make NHS data more useable and accessible for research; and will develop, evaluate and apply appropriate analytical tools to NHS data in real time in order to inform decision making and improve health for both the patient and population. The Institute of Digital Healthcare (IDH), WMG will lead the Warwick part of the programme, together with colleagues from Warwick Medical School and Warwick’s Mathematics Institute.