Elevating engineering dreams - The making of a flying taxi with Grant Mildwaters
Feb 04, 2024
Manufacturing Excellence Forum Sunshine Coast
Join the exhilarating ride into the future as we chat with Grant Mildwaters, a visionary who's traversing the realms of jewelry design to the cutting-edge engineering of flying taxis.
In an industry where the sky's the limit, Grant and his Aerostructure's Team are laying the blueprint for an eVTOL that's as robust as it is revolutionary. With anecdotes about the synergy between Flight Systems, Manufacturing, and safety crews, this episode is a testament to the power of teamwork in reaching new heights. And it's not just about the nuts and bolts; we're tackling the critical aspects of risk assessment that ensure these flying marvels are as safe as they are spectacular.
This installment isn't merely a chat; it's a masterclass in applied structural engineering. We're getting our hands dirty with tension tests on 3D-printed models, challenging the very fibers of innovation. Grant's experiences underscore the value of practical learning, where university theory meets the thrill of material failure.
Each crack and snap leads to a breakthrough, with Grant's journey highlighting the importance of collaborative discovery, from the lab to the classroom, and right up to the blueprints of tomorrow's transport.
Fasten your seatbelts for a narrative that celebrates the shared growth and the sheer delight of watching your engineering dreams soar to life.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of "Takeaway with the MEF."
We hope you found this discussion insightful and engaging. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing, rating, and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform.
Get in Touch:
We love hearing from our listeners! Send us your feedback, questions, or suggestions at neeraj.chadee@mefsc.org.au
Stay Tuned:
Don't miss our next episode where we'll dive into another intriguing topic. Until then, remember to keep seeking knowledge, staying curious, and finding your own takeaways.
"Takeaway with the MEF" is brought to you by Manufacturing Excellence Forum Sunshine Coast and Advertastic PTY Ltd. Thank you for your support!
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily represent the official position of the MEF or its affiliates.
Join the exhilarating ride into the future as we chat with Grant Mildwaters, a visionary who's traversing the realms of jewelry design to the cutting-edge engineering of flying taxis.
In an industry where the sky's the limit, Grant and his Aerostructure's Team are laying the blueprint for an eVTOL that's as robust as it is revolutionary. With anecdotes about the synergy between Flight Systems, Manufacturing, and safety crews, this episode is a testament to the power of teamwork in reaching new heights. And it's not just about the nuts and bolts; we're tackling the critical aspects of risk assessment that ensure these flying marvels are as safe as they are spectacular.
This installment isn't merely a chat; it's a masterclass in applied structural engineering. We're getting our hands dirty with tension tests on 3D-printed models, challenging the very fibers of innovation. Grant's experiences underscore the value of practical learning, where university theory meets the thrill of material failure.
Each crack and snap leads to a breakthrough, with Grant's journey highlighting the importance of collaborative discovery, from the lab to the classroom, and right up to the blueprints of tomorrow's transport.
Fasten your seatbelts for a narrative that celebrates the shared growth and the sheer delight of watching your engineering dreams soar to life.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of "Takeaway with the MEF."
We hope you found this discussion insightful and engaging. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing, rating, and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform.
Get in Touch:
We love hearing from our listeners! Send us your feedback, questions, or suggestions at neeraj.chadee@mefsc.org.au
Stay Tuned:
Don't miss our next episode where we'll dive into another intriguing topic. Until then, remember to keep seeking knowledge, staying curious, and finding your own takeaways.
"Takeaway with the MEF" is brought to you by Manufacturing Excellence Forum Sunshine Coast and Advertastic PTY Ltd. Thank you for your support!
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily represent the official position of the MEF or its affiliates.
Speaker 1:
As doing this project means it makes sense, it actually takes it out of the abstract and into the real world.
Speaker 2:
Takeaway with the MVF. This series follows a group of students and industry experts of the joint forces to create a flying taxi, or EV-tall. I'm your host, naraj, and this is a conversation I had with Grant Mildwaterz, jewelry designer and currently a first year engineering student at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Let's take it away. Team, are you part of the Air Structures Team? Air Structures okay, excellent, I might say they've got a dashing mental for the Air.
Speaker 1:
Structures Team Modesty is one of your many fantastic activities.
Speaker 2:
Exactly, you have noticed. What does the Air Structures Team do?
Speaker 1:
We're responsible for the actual structure of the aircraft, so all of the physical spines in the wings, the body, how it all actually connects together and holds together more to the point, to make sure everything's strong enough, everything's the right shape, sizes, all that sort of thing, things like the flight systems. They do the actual flight surfaces, they'll tell us what shape to make the wings, but we're the ones who have to actually make sure the wing holds together and stays attached to fuselage, the wings they attach that's pretty important and the priority of things.
Speaker 2:
Yes, very important, and so it's essentially making sure that they are quite full, be able to take all those loads that you expect and service. I guess there's a lot of collaboration that Duke would need to have with some of the other teams in the project running parallel to the Air Structures.
Speaker 1:
Team, the supply systems I mentioned before. So they're all responsible for things like I'm presuming it's the other responsible for things like the shapes of the wings, to make sure they give the right lift and deery, and all that sort of thing, stability and all that kind of stuff. Yes, aerodynamic stability. There's the manufacturing team, so they're responsible for actually building the thing.
Speaker 2:
So we get to design it. They've got to build it.
Speaker 1:
So obviously we try and make sure we keep good communication with them.
Speaker 1:
Otherwise, we can design all the stuff we like, but if it's not going to work, it's not going to work Exactly. So that's the skills. There's the electrical and software. The software, so they do all the wiring for it and the actual control systems to operate all these things. So again we make the physical structures, the flight systems, make the shapes of how everything has to be, and then the software and electrical systems actually operate those. And then there's the business systems, which is also the overarching project of the business side of things.
Speaker 2:
So things like all the organization, the better word bureaucracy of it, I suppose, anyway, which is needed and allows everyone to run as efficiently as we can.
Speaker 1:
Actually I'm getting a bit of experience in the bureaucracy side of things with doing the risk assessment. The whole point this is to learn something. So in normal situations you probably just cut and paste, but you there's fairly standard sort of stuff to put in there. I'm starting from scratch with it because something I will need to learn to do, so I might as well learn how to do it properly is it for the uni?
Speaker 2:
is it for what is it for?
Speaker 1:
well, it's through the uni, but it's really for everybody. Basically everybody does actually benefit from it. So the idea is that it's to make sure that we have actually looked at what is possible to go wrong, and that's possible. There's, you know, all sorts of things can can go wrong in something, and often catastrophically, and so you've got to be aware that, okay, this may happen. You know, hopefully it won't, obviously, but it might do. There's inherent risks in things, and so you have to then take precautions to make sure that, if that happens, or either to prevent it happening or minimize it the chance of it happening, and, if it does happen, minimize the risk of it actually injuring somebody, because we don't want to hurt anybody, you know there's.
Speaker 1:
Everybody needs to be able to leave safe and sound and be safe and sound while they're there, so it protects the uni in the sense of it's. We've gone through and actually assessed all these things and put in place the procedures and the controls to make sure these things don't happen and obviously we as the students benefit from it because we kept safe Kelvin safety gets a bit of a bad rap. The other thing they're a bunch of kill joys like oh yeah, accepting that they are risked, about managing those risks.
Speaker 2:
In my own industry, where we're doing molten repairs on aircraft, every project starts with a risk assessment and you know it doesn't have to be complicated thing. Yeah, you might learn about risk assessment in a course, but to get to actually do it in practice, yeah, learning a lot more.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, learning a lot more. Yeah, so, yeah, so those sort of things. So I also get a bit of interaction with the higher levels of the university as well, as something that's happening, yeah, and it's moved quite fast since then a lot has happened in a very short space of time.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, would you say it's not ideal when you're with 13 of uni, is it?
Speaker 1:
uh, yeah, look, you got to prioritize something. Yeah, yeah, so, but it's also good sometimes to have something else to think about and certainly have having the program be a an application of what I'm learning. So what I'm learning is like, oh, that's why I'm learning it, or yeah, that's where I can use it, or oh, now this actually makes some sense because it's brought into the real world, to what I'm actually going to do with it so it's almost like even a indendum to what you're learning that you need to put them into practical space.
Speaker 2:
To, I say, more than an addendum.
Speaker 1:
It's actually a. It's an underpinning. Oh okay, it sort of shows where these things are useful. Because at uni we can learn a lot of stuff completely devoid of any context, particularly in maths don't get me started. But we have to learn these skills and we have to learn these things, but it's all very abstract, whereas doing this project means it makes sense.
Speaker 2:
It actually takes it out of the abstract into the real world yeah, I feel like that now underpinning it, puts it into context exactly what the whole project is about. I guess it's a good structure team it's going to be designing, it's going to affect the weight and that's going to feed into them and then and also what they make you, because obviously there'll be shapes of the airfoils and all those sorts of things, and so we have to work within that, that shape and size or whatever.
Speaker 1:
So, yeah, there's going to be a lot of collaboration between us, which is is what happens, yeah, in the world. You know, you've got teams working on one thing, teams working on another, and they should be talking a lot, yeah they should be talking a lot it's, rather than having sort of separate teams. It's more so, I think, separate priority. You know, it's like you focus. That's the way that's what I think. Yeah, yeah, and so each team has a focus, but not exclusive. It's there is, we're working amongst each other.
Speaker 2:
One of the things I've been trying to develop in my own engineering career is to understand enough about other Disciplines to be able to put myself in the issues. Yeah, but obviously I have my own Expertise. If you want to call it that, I can do you go deep into it, but but at least understand what the other disciplines are doing. This is actually getting Exposure to what fly dynamics. Are you getting exposure to electrical software teams in manufacturing, because we're all in the same room. Yeah, exactly yeah we're all there.
Speaker 1:
There was a technology we're gonna have to actually develop, apparently for this. It's Tim was saying the variable pitch Rotary teller, right, okay, wow, it's, technology doesn't exist for that. I Put my hand up to give it a go.
Speaker 2:
No idea what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I wonder what earth I'm doing. But that's Give it a go. Jim was saying that it was he's got, oh yeah fantastic.
Speaker 2:
When's your thesis due? I'm first year, right if you had four hands. It all be up in the air all the time.
Speaker 1:
I won't be the one with my name on at the end, mm-hmm. But what I can do and what I will benefit greatly from, is all the background research. How does it propel a work? Why do they vary the pitch? How much buy all this sort of I that I don't know? I can find that out and Do all that base work. Mm-hmm, I will learn a Bucket load out of it, yeah, and then I can hand that on to say here we go.
Speaker 1:
There's all the all the background research there. This is where we're at, and the people who are more experienced in that area can then take that and run with it.
Speaker 2:
I Guess the other skills that you do, brought for projects with that, with liaising with other people, all the liaising with the administration, all that can you talk about as students are going so far.
Speaker 1:
Is it just interesting to see the other side of the non-technical side of engineering, which is probably sort of in the project management side of things, which I actually got no to have an interest in doing. Actually, I'm quite interested in doing that Down the line, losing with different people, the different stakeholders, as they call. So it's not just the technical details and the calculations and all that it's. Where does this project fit within the university? How does it relate with the university? How does the university relate with the schools? Are involved Interesting to do? Yeah, it's been fascinating.
Speaker 2:
No one's gonna hold your hand. Essentially it's just go out there and do it and talk to people you need to talk to.
Speaker 1:
Wouldn't say they're not holding my hand outside. I'm certainly coming to them saying I don't know what I'm doing, please advise and they've been always very, very helpful and very accommodating for that as well.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I've sought them out and say, hey, okay, I need to speak to you because when we have to do this but I don't know what I'm doing, can you give me a hand? Yeah, and so it's all about working with people and working with the uni to try and get things happening, working with this, the safety team, to get things happening, rather than trying to say we want to do this, you make it happen. He's like how do we do this? How does, how does everybody work together to achieve?
Speaker 2:
an outcome.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think if you come to people saying Without an attitude, exactly exactly without an attitude, without an, I already know everything and you have to do it my way. Yeah, it's the comes to learning. I'm not sure. What do you want out of this? What do I land this? How do we work? So both of us are happy or both of us are unhappy, depending on how the compromise goes but yeah, that's the idea is to try and Work together. That's good exposure.
Speaker 2:
Going back to the A restructures team itself, can you talk a little bit about what the team has been up to in the past few weeks?
Speaker 1:
Last week we've mainly been focusing on tension testing of materials, because the first ones we're making are going to be 3D printed.
Speaker 2:
So there's, and that's the drawings right.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, we're starting with a 1 to 50 scale, so it's quite small. It's about less than 50 centimetres across.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, really quite small. That's going to be 3D printed, which we've got awesome 3D printer which I saw work in this morning, which is really cool, really fast. So there's lots and lots of data out there for various engineering materials, so things like metals and composites and all that sort of stuff. There's a lot of information there, but not so much about 3D printed ones, because once fairly new, so it's not really used in the end product usually, so they haven't tended to test it. So we're printing out some dog bones, some little. They look kind of like a dog bone, as they know for tension testing here at the uni. So that's again another exercise that we can do that is practical, and then we can use the calculations and so forth that we've learned, the theory that we've learned here, to then work out what size we need for things. And yeah, again, it puts things into context. Yeah, right, plus we get to destroy things. So it's going to be fun.
Speaker 2:
That's the best thing about being a structural engineer is that you get to see things break.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, at what point does it break? Yeah, let's find that point.
Speaker 2:
And try to predict, which is very satisfying. If you can predict when something breaks and it breaks, it's pretty much that point. That's a good feeling.
Speaker 1:
It's an unusual, it's a sense of achievement in destroying something, but yeah, yeah, exactly, all right, so cool.
Speaker 2:
So the scale model is going to be 3D printed. We don't have the strength of the materials, and so that's why we're going for that process now. Yeah, we're trying to figure out what the strength of the materials are using, testing for now, which is great and then we can use that to sort of size our members Typically in industry. Well, at least for what I'm doing, I don't get to do that testing that often, right? So, because most of the materials that I'm using are metals that have published values out there, so with a high degree of confidence, so I can use those values. But dealing with composites, for example, then I could get involved with doing some destructive testing, which is always fun. So it's great that you get to see that side of things and so, arguably, as in with the uni, to get that tested in their machines and all that. Yeah, well, we'll actually be doing the testing ourselves.
Speaker 1:
We won't be just handing it over to someone else. We'll actually get to do it Very good. So, which is again the whole idea, is for us to do things Rather than just be sort of told what to do or anything like that. The idea is that we actually do it and we do the exercise. Obviously, it's going to be us uni students who actually operate the machinery. The school students won't be able to do that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, but they'll be present. I'm assuming we'll be present there.
Speaker 1:
They'll be a part of it and that's really important that we keep them as a part of the actual exercise. We'll work out an idea, right? Okay, we can go through it this way, this way, right? Well, let's find out, let's test that and let's test that.
Speaker 2:
See which one works better. Here's the idea now to set up the testing process so that, as we scale up the EV tool, we can then and we need to do some more testing we can use that process that's already set up and do the testing there.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, exactly this stage is very much the laying the ground work for anything. So, yeah, the testing processes finding out about the machines, about what they need and what we can get out of those machines, obviously things like the risk assessments so we can, because each thing is going to be a different task. So once we get the foundations down, then each iteration after that will just be oh yeah, cool, we know what we're doing. Now we can do this stuff and get on with it.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so if we zoom back and look at the whole project itself, any high level takeaway so far from this project as a whole?
Speaker 1:
it's exciting, it's fun, it's interesting. It's, yeah, we can actually do something. And that thinks that the big takeaway is that we get to actually do something with what we're learning. I'm very, very big on contextual learning, so the idea of doing something and, in that process, learning what you need, that's, that's right down there. That's me all over Great. That's great Take away.
Speaker 2:
contextual learning. Yes, very good, absolutely Great. Thank you very much. No, thank you very much. Folks, this is all we have time for. Keep sending your feedback. Theors hopes dreams are the email address in the show notes, and do keep an eye out for the next episode. Until then, I'll put it in onwards. Folks, this is all we have time for. Keep sending your feedback. Theors hopes dreams are the email address in the show notes, and do keep an eye out for the next episode. Until then, I'll put it in onwards.