We were delighted to welcome Michael Wheeldon (LS Sy 03-10) to speak to the Sixth Form as part of our regular Friday afternoon lecture series. Michael’s talk, entitled ‘Yes, I’m an engineer, no, I can’t fix your car’, addressed some of the preconceptions that students might have surrounding engineering as a career.
Michael always knew he wanted to be an engineer (although at first he called it ‘an inventor’) and while at Bloxham his passions were maths and science. After leaving Bloxham, he went on to Cambridge University where he graduated with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering.
While at university, Michael became lead engineer on a student project to design, build and race a solar powered car from the North Coast to the South Coast of Australia. The project culminated with a trip ‘down under’ to race up and down the Stuart Highway – 3000 km of gruelling outback conditions. This project really cemented for Michael that engineering is a team sport. What was particularly rewarding was seeing the design project through from start to finish, from a blank piece of paper to taking part in the race.
Michael was also fortunate to gain a year’s placement in the structural design team with the Red Bull Formula 1 team. This work involved running lots of simulations, with various stresses and forces, to ascertain whether particular parts were strong enough for the job. Here his love of maths once more came to the fore, with many of the calculations used during the simulations being calculated using Microsoft Excel.
After graduating, Michael joined Ricardo, an engineering consultancy, where he worked on a wide range of projects. One of his favourite projects was with a wind turbine manufacturer. Here he was part of a small team that came up with a sensor system which allowed the team to monitor and analyse the stress and lubrication conditions within the bearings of the wind turbine in real time which hadn’t been done before. A career highlight was climbing the 120 meter tall wind turbine in the North Sea to install the bespoke sensor system in the bearing. To give an idea of scale the bearing was five meters across and weighed 20 tonnes.
After eight years, Michael left Ricardo and moved to his current employer, Ceres Power, who design and develop class-leading solid oxide fuel cell and electrolyser systems. He is currently on the team developing a first-off demonstrator system which will convert green electricity to hydrogen at record efficiencies at industrial scale.
It was clear from his talk that Michael finds his work varied, stimulating and interesting. Although he does get his hands dirty – and this can be one of the most fulfilling and rewarding parts of his work – there are many other aspects to his work. He explained that much of engineering is about making predictions and models, and being analytical, which uses a lot of physics and chemistry, and he also applies computer science and electronics to his work. As he put it ‘the excitement of applying your knowledge to turn a sketch on a post-it note into a real thing never grows stale!’
Michael acknowledged that Bloxham had given him a good grounding to follow his chosen career, in terms of teaching, but also in terms of the variety and number of options available to him as a student. He spent a lot of time working on school productions doing the lighting and sound, skills he uses to this day as a key member of the technical team of his local non-professional theatre. He also made some fantastic friends who he is still in touch with now. In conclusion, Michael reiterated to Sixth Formers, that ‘you get out of Bloxham what you put in, so you should make the most of every opportunity’.