New QE engineering team takes on challenge after last year’s success

Four Year 12 boys will be among 1,300 pupils from across the country taking part in a prestigious annual engineering competition this year.

Ife Adepegba, Rushab Badiani, Saad Hamid and Michael Zhao (pictured below, left to right) are being sponsored in the Engineering Education Scheme (EES) by local housing specialist Lovell.

QE has a history of success in the EES, which is run annually by the Engineering Development Trust. It introduces Sixth-Formers to the world of engineering and promotes links between participating schools and sponsoring local companies. The scheme also aims to attract more young people into the industry, which faces a chronic skills shortage and needs to double its graduate population by 2020.

Lovell engineers have given the QE team the task of designing a system or product that reduces the amount of ambient noise generated by metal cutting blades and sawing equipment on a construction site. The design brief stipulates that the solution should reduce noise on the construction site to safe levels, while still allowing all sizes of building materials to be cut.

The team has already been on a three-day residential workshop at Cambridge University, where they attended engineering lectures and worked with Lovell engineers and the university’s technical team to clarify their concepts and test their design.

The boys have a tough act to follow: last year’s QE team of Burhan Ashraf, Karan Dewnani, Christopher Wong and Sachin Leelasena were awarded the highest score ever recorded by the EES in the scheme’s 12-year history for their ideas for rescuing incapacitated operators trapped in the seat of a tower crane. Three of the four went on to present their ideas to some of the UK’s leading construction industry organisations, crane operators and health and safety groups, who have expressed an interest in taking their idea to the production stage and sponsoring the students’ university studies.