The Rector visits Physics

The Rector visited the Instrumentation Workshop on his centenary tour of the Physics Department.

The Rector visited the Instrumentation Workshop on his centenary tour of the Physics Department. Refurbishment works were not complete when the rector visited so we were only able to show phase 1 of the facility being built in two phases.

I began by indicating the type of research work we support here and went on to show engineering examples; first a decelerator, work carried out by Jon Dyne who is the technician for the Centre for Cold Matter and then a flight recorder instrumentation box built here for the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group. The instrumentation box is now in flight orbiting the planet Venus. I went on to explain how we support undergraduate teaching by building undergraduate projects.

We then visited some of the new engineering and design equipment funded from our SRIFcapital equipment budget; first our rapid prototyping machine and our to be commissioned CAD suite and then the machine shop where I told the Rector the SRIF investment  had totally transformed the workshop.  We now have a good mix of modern conventional and CNC machine tools and are well placed to support the research within the Physics Department enabling researchers to compete on an international stage and secure project funding.