The challenge tasks engineering students to design coatings systems for selected products as a part of their course curriculum. In this year's challenge the students were asked to engineer a coating system for a revolutionary gravel bike, built around a unique laminated wooden frame.
NMITE, New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering, is a new higher education Institute, ground-breaking in academia, backed by industry, government and educators from across the world. The institute focuses on producing work-ready graduates to fuel global development. NMITE's education format seeks to solve engineering skills shortages by delivering bright, vibrant young skilled engineers to manufacturing companies.
Cleftbridge owner and CEO, Peter Rieck, comments: "Across a wide range of industries, customers use our expertise to help refine their requirements and our ability to successfully apply coatings, whether wet paint or powder, to ensure their products are brought successfully to market; we become, in effect, an outsourced part of their production processes."
"We are particularly interested to work with NMITE because it combines learning with real world engineering challenges. NMITE brings together the practical application of core engineering principles to foster innovation in technology and design for emerging generations of engineering talent. This gives us the opportunity to expose students to the positive impact that coatings can have on the concepts of their projects; it brings a different technical dimension to their engineering armoury."
"The challenge was created to generate integrated thinking by the students, along these lines."
Twmpa Cycles, based locally in Hay-on-Wye has already commissioned Cleftbridge to provide a coating solution that showcases its ground-breaking bike frame made from European Ash that is grown in the UK. The Cleftbridge Challenge has taken this product to NMITE for engineering students to apply their developing skills in devising possible coating systems for this high-tech bicycle.
Peter Rieck continues: “Through the challenge students focus attention on the relationship between materials, in particular coatings, and the ultimate design objectives of a given product. So often this relationship is overlooked in the design stage, at a cost to the product, with unwelcome compromises and financial implications. What we asked the students to do mirrors much of what we do in our working relationship with our clients."
To complete the challenge successfully, the students have to use initiative and research in accommodating such factors as ‘fit for purpose', durability, engineering benefits, aesthetics, coatings application and cost, within a framework of sustainability and environmental benefits.
