Duc Pham sept
Here is a small puzzle for you, esteemed readers. What do chatter and Petro Forge have in common?
Before I give you the answer, imagine living in a global city that has grown from being the first manufacturing town in the world to become a major international commercial centre with the second largest urban agglomeration economy in the UK. Imagine working in the country’s oldest civic university on a beautiful campus located in that thriving city. Imagine being at the helm of Mechanical Engineering, the university’s academic department with historically the strongest links to the industrial prosperity of the city. Imagine sitting on a chair once owned by James Watt, arguably the most famous mechanical engineer of all time and one of the most influential figures in human history. I am in the fortunate position of actually doing all the above for the past year since returning to my old institution, my first employer, the University of Birmingham, to lead our School of Mechanical Engineering.
When I first joined the School (then called a Department) as a young lecturer in 1979, we had some 120 staff, roughly equally divided between teaching, research and support functions. We were known internationally for our work which covered the whole spectrum of mechanical engineering subjects — fluid mechanics, heat transfer, solid mechanics, dynamics and manufacturing. We had world-class activities in the areas of two-phase flows, turbo machinery, automobile dynamics, machine tools, metal forming and metal cutting. Scholars from all corners of the globe competed to come and study or work with us and with our sister department, the Department of Engineering Production, which focused on post- graduate teaching and research in manufacturing processes and systems.
With the decline of manufacturing industry and daily closure of manufacturing companies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was difficult across the UK to attract students to manufacturing
programmes. At the time, there was a trend in the Higher Education (HE) sector here to merge specialist manufacturing departments with those dealing more generally with mechanical engineering to effect savings and create larger and more resilient cost centres. Thus, the forerunner of my present School was formed.
The expansion of HE in the 1990s saw large increases in enrolment but mainly in the Arts. Undergraduate Manufacturing Engineering programmes continued to be unpopular and were closed down at many institutions, often with loss of academic posts affiliated with those programmes. Compared to the Department I left in 1988, the School that I inherited on my return 23 years later had very few staff working in the manufacturing area. The Bhag I have set for myself is to grow that area and re-establish the School’s world-class status.
Fortunately for us, in recent times, there has been greater realisation at all levels of the important role of manufacturing in wealth and job creation and the need to re-balance the economy by supporting the expansion of the advanced manufacturing sector. This has motivated the government to provide funding for support schemes such as the High-Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult of which the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) co-founded by my institution is a member. To give us the capacity to assume leading roles in MTC and HVM activities, the institution recently approved our proposal to invest in new academic positions in advanced manufacturing. Overnight, this has nearly doubled the size of our team working in this area. Although we still require many more staff to reach our former strengths, this is a very welcome step in the redevelopment of the School.
Can we achieve my Bhag? Given the support of the institution, given our committed and talented team and given our unique expertise and facilities in areas such as automotive engines and micro/nano technology that have resulted from astute investment decisions by my predecessors, in the words made famous during the 2008 US presidential elections, ‘Yes, we can.’
Oh, the answer to the puzzle. Chatter, a phenomenon observed in some machining operations, and Petro Forge, a high-energy-rate forming machine, were two of the research areas that gave the School its world-class status. They were both pioneered by the late Professor S .A. Tobias who recruited me in 1979 and whose Chance Chair of Engineering I now have the honour of occupying.