INSIST was presented at the Mediterranean Science Festival in Limassol Cyprus between the 3rd and 4th of December, at the booth of the Functionally Optimized Structures Group of the Cyprus University of Technology. The festival boasted almost 10000 visitors from the general public who were eager to see different scientific achievements, interact with researchers across various disciplines and learn about different careers in science and engineering.
Over the first two days of the Festival we talked to high school students about metal foams, their properties and potential applications. The students were amazed by the lightness of the material and could not believe their eyes when they would see some specimens floating in water! They were very keen to play with it and would come up with numerous applications for it.
The other interactive activity that we had in our booth and proved quite popular across students ranging from primary school to high school was the interactive structural analysis tool, Catastrophe, from the Expedition Workshed website. This is a free structural analysis tool that you can model and test in real time 2D structures. By pushing and pulling the structural models at different locations, one can see the deflections in real time as well as the stresses in each bar, which are denoted by different colours. This tool is very helpful at this stage in allowing students build up their intuitive understanding of structural behaviour, even before they can proceed with the mathematical analysis of their structural models.
In other news, the production of steel foam cubes progresses normally as well as the first prototypes of graded density sandwich beams. The sample preparation will progress through February and we are looking for testing the first samples in early March. The project was also presented to the 90 students of the Engineering Stress Analysis module at Cranfield University and quite a few showed interest to contribute through their MSc individual projects.