Over the past few weeks TU Delft students have been taking part in the first round of the European BEST Engineering Competition (EBEC). Made up of three rounds, each with a Team Design Challenge and a case-study, it offers students from different backgrounds the opportunity to practically apply knowledge gained in class to real-life situations.
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The competition is organised by BEST, the Board of European Students of Technology, which describes itself as striving to ‘help European Students of Technology become more internationally minded’. There is a local, a regional and finally a European round, with the winners of each progressing to the next. 40 students from TU Delft took part this year, split into 10 teams.
The Team Design Challenge, the first of the local rounds, was held in Delft February 27 and was organised in conjunction with bike shop Leren Doen. The teams were challenged to build a device out of spare bike parts and scrap metal which could control the movement of a loop through a wire structure with no direct manual control, and no contact between the loop and the wire. The winning group from this round was team ‘Tupalkite’.
The case-study this year was partnered with the Engine Services department from KLM, something the students from BEST Delft were particularly proud of. Holed up in the TU delft library Saturday March 12 the teams developed solutions for how to keep track of engine components while they are at KLM for maintenance. Each engine has 40, 000 components and up to 30 engines can be repaired at once, and even if they are of the same make each must get its own original components back.
VP of external relations at BEST Delft, Rakshith Malige told Delta this case-study was particularly hard. “I think it’s gonna be a challenge to do it in real-time, because it is a lot of components,” he said, something head of Corporate Relations, Elena De Lazzari agreed with. They added that this difficulty posed an opportunity for students from different faculties to pool their expertise and solve this interdisciplinary problem. Coaches from KLM were present to guide students on the practicality of their solutions in a real-life business. Technology, Policy and Management student Siqing Sun described this as “practical”, adding “every time we come up with something and ask [KLM] do you think its practical, or possible they say ‘we don’t wanna change this, or that’. That’s the tricky part… real life is a lot more difficult.”
Team ‘Isonomy’ ultimately won the case-study with their idea of categorizing parts not with labels, but by identifying their characteristic microstructure. The regional round will begin in Belgium March 30.
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