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  • Publication of Book: The Earthing and Bonding for AC Electrified Railways

    The Background to the Book Many public domain standards and company documents exist to guide the design of the earthing and bonding of AC railway electrification systems but in practice there remains both gaps, overlaps and conflicts between them. Therefore, it is not uncommon for the designs to follow discipline specific scope rather than being holistic in their approach. The complexity of integrating the earthing of a 25kV electrified railway with various electrical distribution systems and exposed conductive parts, means that it is impossible to prescribe one earthing and bonding design solution that addresses the needs of every railway. Therefore, this creates different earthing designs for individual railways.   The Scope of 25kV Railway Earthing and Bonding Requirements This guide aims…

    Lynsay Callaghan
    Lynsay Callaghan

  • National Particle Accelerator Open Day

    The Cockcroft Institute hosted the 2021 National particle accelerator open day virtually on Wednesday, 3rd February 2021.The aim of the event was to ensure we get the opportunity to speak to undergraduate students about accelerators despite the lockdown. The open day had an exciting programme of events including talks and lab virtual tours plus the opportunity for students to talk to UK universities, laboratories and industry at virtual recruitment stands to find out how you can find studentship and employment opportunities in this exciting field. This year the tours were done in a virtual environment with two tours offered one of the Diamond light source, the UK’s flagship synchrotron light source, and one of the Elekta factory, a world-leading producer of radiotherapy machines. Talks on graduate…

    Joanne Longton
    Joanne Longton

  • John Snow And The Fight Against Cholera

    Presenters: David Moore Synopsis: By the summer of 1831 cholera had become firmly established in the environment of the UK. The effects of this disease was devastating, people were dying in their thousands, there was no know cause and no known cure. Current medical knowledge thought that illness and disease was spread by bad air or miasma. A young apprentice doctor who treated cholera victims did not believed it was caused though bad air, but proving his theory became a challenge to the established medical and scientific beliefs of the time. This is the story of how John Snow changes out understanding of how diseases were spread, and how we could control it. This event clashed with another important event:- a lovely sunny evening. I must admit, I was going to log on, give it five minutes, then…

    Samuel Wane
    Samuel Wane

  • Multisensory Farmbots: Turning Data Into Action With Weed-electrocution And Slug Elimination

    Here is the place to discuss the event. Interesting links will be added. Presenter: Andrew Hall, Tech Lead - Small Robot Company Synopsis: Meet Small Robot Company's monitoring robot Tom and artificial intelligence system Wilma. Tom is now on farms gathering a variety of data - including vision, sensors and geolocation - with soil probes and sound to follow. Find out how SRC is turning this into a robotic Per Plant Farming service.   Location: Zoom Contact: Sam Wane   E: samuel.wane@ietvolunteer.org Register: https://localevents.theiet.org/f799c6

  • The Role Of Behavioural Science In Road Transport Webinars - 18-19 May 2021

    We’ve all appreciated over the past year how user behaviour has impacted on travel across all modes of transport.  Some see this as an opportunity to “reset” and to introduce new technology and change services to help meet future safety and environmental goals.  Although it’s partly an issue of technology and investment, making these changes also depends strongly on user acceptance and behaviour.These two webinars were organised by the Automotive and Road Transport Systems Technical Network of the IET.  They were intended to give engineers a better appreciation and understanding of the role of behavioural science in the design and operation of future transport-related products and services. We had over 300 registrants from more than 30 countries and the audience were encouraged to contribute…

    Deborah-Claire McKenzie
    Deborah-Claire McKenzie

  • Midlands Power Group -Power Networks Flexibility

    On Tuesday 16th February 2021, the Midlands Power Group hosted an on-line talk entitled Power Networks and Flexibility to Accommodate Changing Usage Patterns given by Dr David Mills of PSC Consulting. PSC has many years of experience in power systems interconnection, HVDC systems, operational, market and distributed energy services along with advisory services to utilities.  Dr Mills started by outlining the challenges for power system owners & operators as distributed renewable generation and the growth in decarbonisation of transport and heating become increasingly significant in both the planning and operation of both transmission and distribution networks.  Aligning renewable generation to demand is not easy due to the variability of source outputs.  When coupled with growing concerns about…

    David Swanson
    David Swanson

  • Time Travel - How We Keep Time Across The Modern World (IET Ireland Local Network).

    Dr Jacquline walker, provided an insightful account of how time keeping began, and how over the decades, measurements and observations of time have progressed, from movement of the sun around objects, through to the use of atomic clocks, and now why GPS still remains the choice of satellite coordination. It really comes down to the different methods of measuring the passing of a day. Not only sundials, we've had water clocks (passing of time through water), candles, and by the 2oth we moved to quartz clocks - whose higher frequency gave a better oscillation for accuracy. But time keeping is regional dependent and that now all systems use leap second, for example international atomic time does not use it, since it's introduction, there are 18 second leap differences between GPS and UTC time…

  • Academic Year Roundup [2020-2021]: IET Young Professionals Coventry And Warwickshire

    This academic year has been such an interesting one to say the least for the IET Young Professionals Coventry and Warwickshire. Read more to see our Committee’s reflections on this very unique year. For the IET Young Professionals, the 2020-2021 academic year has been a challenging one, full of adaptations and breakthroughs. In previous years, we have always held in-person events successfully. When COVID-19 began, we had to change all of our plans; for the first time, we held all of our events virtually to make sure of event safety. We had to re-shape the way our events are run, which presented a lot of challenges and opportunities for us as a network. A lot of the challenges that we have faced in the last year have definitely been remodelling our in-person events into an online-friendly format…

    Vanessa Jane Stanley
    Vanessa Jane Stanley

  • Importance Of Patients’ Data Collection In The Healthcare Industry

    The healthcare industry is constantly evolving and transforming. Currently, it supports modern technologies, devices, and tools to gather as much data about patients as possible, alongside artificial intelligence (AI), big data, machine learning, and computer vision shaping the new trends and principles for the industry. Using multiple sources to gather data allows for higher levels of insight, visibility, and transparency that can be used to develop an effective personalized treatment approach. Despite all the benefits of new technologies and data sources, it is still challenging to maintain an effective healthcare data management system while also portraying its value. We are, at this moment, looking at the foundation of a more challenging healthcare landscape that, irrespective of how advanced…

  • Online Engineering-Links

    Talk on 27th May 2021 included lots of live demos of engineering tools. Here is a selection. www.haper-adams.ac.uk https://vr.vex.com/ https://phyphox.org/ https://virtlabs.tech/ https://www.mdx.ac.uk/ https://www.staffs.ac.uk/    https://www.staffs.ac.uk/people/alison-griffiths    https://www.linkedin.com/in/a1isonlgriffiths/    https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8391-7751    https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPHwWVYoSgnk4gt6D-uaVVm8eha77wBhy    https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Ultra/Getting_Started/What_Is_Blackboard_Learn    https://www.digitaled.com/products/courseware    https://www.turnitinuk.com/login_page.asp?ev_custom_domain=ev.turnitinuk.com    https://www.mentimeter.com/    https://www.tinkercad.com/    https://www.tinkercad.com/things/7qolSbtWZYA-first-blink/editel    https…

    Samuel Wane
    Samuel Wane

  • 'Capturing the Action'

    Last week's webinar recording is now available to view in 'Videos'.

    A.C.Cunningham (Colin)
    A.C.Cunningham (Colin)

  • Therapy & Oncology Accelerator Design Student Network (TOADS)

    A small group of students from CERN, the John Adams Institute and the Cockcroft Institute, working on PhDs involving medical accelerators have recognised the need to increase international collaboration and cohesion between students who are researching or designing radiotherapy machines, or similar.Unlike many experiments which often have large collaborations and centralised locations around one facility, medical accelerators are spread throughout the world and have smaller research groups.  Whilst normally these groups would meet and exchange ideas at conferences or in-person, the pandemic has meant that newer and more recent students are less able to connect to establish friendships, help each other out with coding/simulation problems and exchange research ideas. For this reason, a new Therapy…

    Joanne Longton
    Joanne Longton

  • Local Prizewinner

    Every year the IET North West Midlands network offers an award to the college student judged to have achieved best overall excellence on a course that falls within the IET’s scope of interest.  The assessment is done by the local college senior tutor in conjunction with the local IET committee.  For 2020 the chosen student was Amy Dodd and the presentation took place at Newcastle Under Lyme college on Monday, 24th May 2021.  The picture shows Amy Dodd being presented with the certificate by Mike Collins IET committee representative (centre), and Dave Halliwell College Lecturer (left). You can read more here:  NEWCASTLE COLLEGE ENGINEERING STUDENT WINS IET AWARD

    Samuel Wane
    Samuel Wane

  • Exciting Education Volunteering Opportunities!

    The IET Education team have recently reviewed and refreshed their Education volunteer programme, to update the Education Officer (EO) role and introduce a brand-new Education Ambassador (EA) role.Both roles are designed to represent the IET to raise awareness in young people, aged 4-19, about the exciting world of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) and inspire them to consider a rewarding engineering career. Ultimately to promote a better understanding of engineers, the contribution engineering makes to society and to inspire the next generation of engineers. Role overview Traditionally associated with in-person school activities, the roles have no real limitations in scope. You can support and attend established organisations activities, from small to large scale and unusual…

    EngX Editorial
    EngX Editorial

  • Online Resources for Introductory Control Course - An IFAC Survey

    In cooperation with IEEE CSS TC on Education the IFAC Technical Committee on Education have released a survey in order to compile a list of available online resources staff could use in an introductory control course. You can find the survey here: https://tinyurl.com/control-resources  Please complete the survey and share as much as possible in your community. The Committee aim to collect as many answers as possible and the results will be made available to the whole community. There will be a further survey related to online teaching during the pandemic.    Further information is available from:  Prof. Ing. Antonio Visioli, Ph.D. Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering University of Brescia e-mail: antonio.visioli@unibs.it http://antonio-visioli.unibs.it/

    Lynsay Callaghan
    Lynsay Callaghan

  • Protolabs InspirON - Join Us For Live Q&A

    The InspirON Sustainability Training Hackathon is an online learning event that fast-forwards participants from across Europe through the growing urgency around sustainability. For design engineers at any stage of their career, this is a great opportunity to learn directly from experts in the field from across Europe Join us at 2.30pm on Tuesday 25th May for a live Q&A session with experts from The Institution of Engineering and Technology, and Creative Technologist Jude Pullen.The live session will explore some of the big picture sustainability issues as well as some of the exciting topics around technology and design. Design and production experts Jeremy Hadall and John Patsavellas from The IET will be joined by Jude Pullen to answer your questions ‘live’ and to discuss design vs brand, data…

  • Hot Weather And Heated Debates

    OK, I may be exaggerating slightly - I'm not sure that the debates actually got all that heated... But I should start at the start! And the start is full of acronyms (be warned). Last month was the Communities Committee - Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CC-EMEA) Communities Volunteer Conference (CVC) - and as a result the Communities Resourcing Committee (CRC) decided to meet in Dubai for a change. And in July Dubai is very hot let me tell you - especially if you've come from a country that is in winter... Going from 14ºC to 44ºC is a bit of a shock to the system! Fortunately we were mostly in air conditioning, so it was pretty manageable. It was a busy few days for me - two days of meetings, then two days of the CVC. But I felt that the time was well spent. We had some good discussions…

  • Talking Pot, Car Cot, Imaginary Menus And Victorian Vehicle Device

    Here is another load of gadgetry I’ve dug up, so if you want to make your life lazier and stranger with this curious collection, go for it. Parrot pot Never be a plant murderer again I know a few people that don’t have the knack for plant keeping. They just look at some foliage and POOF! It’s dead. I’ve even known someone to kill a cactus. A lot of plants are cruelly neglected or drowned every day due to poor knowledge, bad luck or forgetfulness of their owners. If you are the kind of person who can never let a flower fulfil its destiny because of your terrible parenting, you should get a Parrot Pot . Heck, get five. They’re only about £130 each. You can become the horticultural master that you’ve always wanted to be. No more regular trips to the local garden centre to replace the…

    admin
    admin

  • IoT & Breaking The Land Speed Record (IET Hereford and Worcester)

    "IoT and breaking the Land Speed record" was presented by Peter Karney, Head of Product Innovation at Digital Catapult, organised jointly with the IET Hereford and Worcester and IMechE network. The 'Bloodhound' is looking to set new land speed records. With 6.4 tons of total weight, the wheels are designed to speed up to 10,200 rpm and are currently being tested to achieve 1000 mph, the current land speed record is 760 mph and was set 20 years ago. For the main propulsion, the bloodhound is using an Eurojet EJ200 jet engine developed for Eurofighter and a bespoke mono propellant rocket to generate 212kN of thrust. It's not only the mechanical engine parts that contribute to the thrust, but also by challenging existing aero dynamical concepts, propulsion efforts are being increased…

  • IET World Railway Series Call For Presenters

    The IET’s UK Railway Technical Network are running a webinar/seminar series showcasing railway construction projects around the world. The objective of this series is to give audiences and understanding of various challenges and solutions experienced when constructing a new railway. We are inviting presenters around the world to present on a railway construction project they are working on and be part of this series. Topics of interest include: • Overview of the railway infrastructure construction • Engineering challenges experienced • Engineering solutions adopted to overcome these challenges Guide for presenters • Series to be broadcast on a webinar platform (Zoom) • Presentation to last 20 to 30 minutes • 15 to 30 minutes Q&A following presentation • Presentations can be viewed on demand…

    Lynsay Callaghan
    Lynsay Callaghan

  • Socially Conscious Engineer Series Webinars - On-demand Available Now!

    n this exclusive webinar series, we aim to explore the human side of engineering and technology industries by inviting guest speakers to discuss a range of socially conscious topics such as workplace harassment, social mobility, neurodiversity, gender stereotype, diversity and inclusion. Our Local Networks and Technical Networks are busy hosting webinars sharing the latest developments in engineering and technology throughout the challenging time we are all facing. However, we shouldn't only focus on the technology itself. IET Communities have pulled together a series of webinars to embrace the real humans who work behind and make it all possible. This series is designed to share empathy and understanding to further enrich our engineering and technology communities. Episode 1: Workplace…

  • Did You Miss Our Webinar On Culture And Competence In The Built Environment?

    On 16 April 2021, we hosted a webinar that looked at culture and competence in the built environment. We discussed a variety of different topics including how to create culture change, how to instil confidence in a functioning competence system, what is needed to ensure effective competency and compliance, and more.  Our speakers included Vicki Reynolds, Chief Technology Officer, i3PT Certification, Debbie Carlton, Director, Dynamic Knowledge, Dr Hywel Davies, Technical Director, CIBSE, Gill Kernick, Master Consultant, and Gus Carroll, CEO and Co-Founder, Empirisys Ltd.  The aim of our webinar was to provide pragmatic advice to help leaders and practitioners put key measures into effect successfully. You can watch the webinar on demand for free here: Raising standards, saving lives – culture…

    IET Policy Editorial
    IET Policy Editorial

  • CPD certificate for 18th May; Holes & Poles

    CPD certificate for 18th May; Holes & Poles

    Andrew Dodd
    Andrew Dodd

  • Ongoing Presentations With Sheffield City Region FE Colleges.

    This is an interim update about the objective of offering presentations to try to get students and apprentices at FE college's to consider membership of the IET and give them the opportunities all our members have to use IET's resources.For some time now, I have  been trying to persuade FE Colleges in the Sheffield City Region to get their students and apprentices to seriously consider becoming members of the IET. Working with Adam Parnell our Professional Registration Account Manager we have carried out during 2019 / 20/ & 21 presentations to Sheffield, Chesterfield and currently Barnsley Colleges,  that cover the complete overview of the IET and its resources and a talk about the SYLN, covering who we are, both our committee structures and what we strive to do locally. The presentations to…

    Alan Chater
    Alan Chater

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