In about a week’s time we shall know the winner of this year’s Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award, the UK’s most prestigious accolade for engineering achievement. The Award, first presented in 1969, honours the winning organisation with a gold medal, and each of the individual nominees with a bronze medal. There is, in addition, a cash prize of £50,000. The presentation of the Award recognises the successful development of innovative ideas in engineering, and seeks to demonstrate the importance of engineering and the role of engineers and scientists in contributing to national prosperity and international prestige.
The four finalists, which were announced last week, represent a significant cross-section of British industry, and demonstrate a level of innovation that, sadly, does not get the press it deserves. Too often we are told that Britain lags in the engineering innovation stakes but this competition would suggest otherwise. So, in alphabetical order, here are the four finalists and their MacRobert Award entries:
The Automation Partnership for Polar, a robotic rapid retrieval system for the UK Biobank, the world’s leading programme to create a large-scale resource for medical research. Polar must keep ten million blood and urine samples at a steady -80 degrees centigrade for 25 years, yet be capable of retrieving any sample within an instant for analysis. Automation Partnership’s team designed a modular, ultra-low temperature compartment to hold the samples, which can be accessed automatically. The key design criterion was maintaining temperature stability during the period of access, which AP has managed to achieve with Polar, enabling samples to the accessed many times over without risk of deterioration (www.automationpartnership.com).
The second finalist is Johnson Matthey for a compact, catalysed soot filter for small diesel engines. Johnson Matthey’s team has come up with a groundbreaking design and manufacturing process that combines the catalyst and filter medium in a single unit that is small enough to fit into the restricted space available beneath the bonnet of a car. Both energy and materials efficient to manufacture, some 1.5 million filter units have already been exported to European car manufacturers, and these are expected to prevent millions of kilograms of soot particles entering the atmosphere over the life of the vehicles in which they are installed (www.matthey.com).
The third finalist is Cambridge University spin-off, Owlstone for its ‘dime’ sized chemical sensor on a silicon chip, which is capable of detecting trace amounts of a wide range of chemicals. Using a technique called Field Asymmetric Ion Mass Spectroscopy, this sensor can be reprogrammed to detect different chemical fingerprints. One of its most exciting potential applications is as a ‘health breathalyser’ that will be capable of diagnosing diseases in individuals by analysing chemicals on their breath (www.owlstonenanotech.co.uk).
The fourth finalist is Touch Bionics for its extraordinary ‘i-LIMB’ bionic hand – believed to be the first commercially available prosthetic device of its kind. Looking and acting just like a real human hand, with five individually powered digits, it heralds a new generation in bionics and patient care. It was launched in the Summer of last year, but began life as a research project back in 1963 to help children affected by Thalidomide. Key innovations include multi-articulating finger movement technology, the application of lightweight, high-strength plastics and leading-edge electronic and mechanical engineering techniques.
The winner of the 2008 MacRobert Award will be announced at the Academy’s Annual Awards Dinner on 9 June 2008.
Les Hunt
Editor
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