Three Cambridge Students – Siddharth Gupta, Gwilym Rowbottom, and Joshua de Gromoboy – have nabbed the prestigious IET Global Challenge award for their ‘Weigh2Go’ take on a system to accurately weighing disaster relief vehicles
The competition is aimed at Engineers aged 18 to 35 and was developed with RedR – an international NGO.
The idea was the each of the 40 teams would compete to win a £250-per-person cash prize by developing a device to measure the load within a Toyota Land Cruiser.
The device could then be used to alert aid-workers if the safe load was exceeded.
One of the practical problems facing NGO’s working in remote locations is their reliance on a fixed fleet of vehicles.
Overloading vehicles every-day can not only damage the fleet but increase the cost of fuel consumption.
The winning solution from the Cambridge Team – ‘Good Vibrations’ – worked using the vibrational response of the vehicle to a known input forces.
This novel approach works by mounting two offset masses to the vehicles chassis and rotating them. The vehicle then ‘vibrates’ and the response can be measured and using an accelerometer which can analyse the added weight.
The team will claim their prize at the IET Innovation Awards in London on 15 November 2017.
