Whatever the future holds for Aerospace & Defence in the wake of the pandemic, digital skills – in design, engineering, simulation and collaboration – are and will remain essential for the industry.
To encourage students, apprentices and recent graduates to leverage these technical and soft skills, Dassault Systèmes launched their first “Sustainable Aviation’ Competition” in the summer of 2020 during the “digital” Farnborough International Airshow at a session organised by the FINN network (the leading aviation industry hub).
About the Competition: The Future of Propulsion in Aviation
This “Sustainable Aviation” competition aimed to bring together future leaders in aerospace innovation to gain practical experience in working with other collaborators on a design, modelling and simulation project. The team members were also able to enhance their computer simulation skills by using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to bring their ideas to life in cooperation with industry and academic experts.
Overall, we had over 40 student teams from all over the UK and Ireland registering for our competition - signalling how important sustainability is for the workforce of the future.
The 3 finalist teams came from the Universities of Bath, Sheffield and Strathclyde. Their out of the box ideas resulted in extremely capable designs, and they simulated sustainable aircrafts powered by lasers, a drone to carrying organs powered by hydrogen and an energy-efficient braking system for commercial airplanes.
Judges for the competition included senior representatives of renowned organisations such as the Aerospace Technology Institute, the AMRC catapult innovation centre, the National Composite Centre, the Royal Aeronautical Society, Airbus, GKN, Vertical Aerospace, the Royal Air Force, the Engineering charity Enginuity and the ADS group (Aerospace, Security and Defence leading trade body in the UK).
Practical details:
· What? The challenge was be to design, model, simulate a solution on the future of propulsion in aviation (E.g. Electrification, alternative fuels, fuel efficiency)
· Who? Teams of students/apprentices (4 to 6 members per team) studying Aerospace, Mechanical, Manufacturing Engineering, etc. in Universities in the UK & Ireland
· When? The competition ran online between 5th October- 2nd November 2020.
· How? Student teams gained access to a suite of software applications on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud to perform their challenge, with some training provided to them in advance
· Prizes included: £100 amazon vouchers (per team member); Certification to recognise skills gained; mentoring sessions with Dassault Systèmes’ experts; Media coverage (via FINN)
· The webpage: https://events.3ds.com/sustainable-aviation-competition
(You can see here all the Top 10 Submissions)
· The extras:
To inspire them, we held 2 podcast interviews with Sameer Savani, Head of Innovation and Engineering - ADS Group Ltd (Aerospace, Defence, Security & Space)- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgOKIiWE7qs - and Stuart Dawson, Chief Technology Officer - AMRC Ltd (Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-il2IyswuE
We created an IFWELOOP to allow both students and judges to work on the platform and have access to the same information on time. This proved a great way to familiarise our ecosystem with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform while working on sustainable innovation.
