Aussie Team Makes it to Airbus “Fly Your Ideas” Contest Final
A team from The University of Queensland has won through to the final round of Airbus Industrie’s Fly Your Ideas global competition for higher education students. The UQ team will be competing for a €30,000 prize with four other teams – from Singapore, the Czech Republic, Spain and the US.
€15,000 will go to the runner-up, and an additional €5,000 to the team chosen by Airbus staff as the “Employees Choice” prize.
The three-member UQ team, named “COz”, comprises team leader Michael Heitzmann and Alex Ng, PhD students in Mechanical Engineering, together with Benjamin Lindenberger who is undertaking his University of Stuttgart diploma thesis at UQ. The team was chosen for its project to use bio-composite materials made from castor plant fibres in aircraft passenger cabins.
The finalists were selected from more than 2,350 students in 225 teams from 82 countries worldwide which originally qualified for the three-round contest, launched last October. The goal of the competition is to challenge students to come up with innovative ideas to shape the future of aviation. Of the original 225 teams, 86 made it into the second round which began in January and ended on March 31.
Over the next month the five teams in the final round will put the finishing touches to their projects with the help of an Airbus coach. The teams will then be flown to Paris as guests of Airbus to make their final presentations before a jury at the world famous Paris Air Show on 19 June.
The jury comprises five Airbus representatives and five independent industry experts, specialised in fields such as engineering, the environment, human resources and marketing.
Australian Airbus spokesman Ted Porter said: “The quality of the entries received in Australia was very impressive and shows the high level of talent being nurtured at our universities in aerospace related subjects.”
“The team has certainly shown tremendous creativity and high quality science to develop a pioneering natural fibre composite from a single plant,” said Professor Martin Veidt, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UQ.
“The product has great potential for applications in the aeronautical industry to substantially reduce the carbon footprint by enabling the manufacturing of fully recyclable polymer components.
“The team has to be congratulated in executing the project from conceptual idea all the way through to the finished product”
The other four contestant teams are:
· The “Big Bang Team” from Spain’s Universidad Politécnica de Valencia for its windowless cabin proposal for a new eco-efficient aircraft design.
· “Kometa Brno” from Czech Republic’s Brno University of Technology in the whose team developed a project on aircraft taxiway movements using electro-motors.
· “Solaire Voyager” from the National University of Singapore, selected for its solar cell technology project integrating photovoltaic cells aboard aircraft to generate electricity.
· “Stanford ADG” from Stanford University in the USA for their proposal on inverted V formation flight, building on the model of migrating birds to reduce energy consumption.
Between now and the Paris Airshow, the teams will prepare their project presentations with the help of an Airbus coach. On 18 June, the teams will present their projects to the jury in Paris.
The first and second place teams will be announced on June19 at Le Bourget (Paris) Airshow where Tom Enders, Airbus President and CEO will present the prizes. “Selecting the five teams was incredibly difficult as the projects submitted were very diverse and of high quality,” declared Patrick Gavin, Airbus Executive Vice-President Engineering and Fly Your Ideas contest patron: “The contest has demonstrated that students from around the world have excellent ideas for the aviation industry of tomorrow”,
Airbus, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary this year, has now registered over 9,200 orders from more than 300 customers worldwide and delivered more than 5,600 aircraft since the company first entered the market. With annual revenues of over 27 billion euros in 2008, Airbus is a global company employing some 52,000 people from over 80 different nationalities.
