Mechanical Engineering

Every day, millions of Hong Kongers use public transport to travel across the city. With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, public transport has the potential to spread the novel Coronavirus. This can be avoided if strict preventive measures are in place.

The solution to this is a non-intrusive, real time application that automates fever screening in public transport vehicles. This is made possible thanks to a mobile application that we are developing at HKU. We use a portable thermal camera and a mobile device to detect faces in a stream of thermal images, and then measure forehead temperatures. This can be done in real-time, and requires little to no manual intervention.

Automation technology has been highly adopted by different manufacturing industries in the past two decades. It shows an increasing investment in research and development throughout these two decades to replace labor in production lines. The leading dyeing and finishing machinery development company Fong’s National Engineering Co. Ltd. offered us a project in device designing to smooth their production line. The head of the raw fabric rolls is usually attached with an adhesive tape to prevent the head from falling out in the transportation process. This project aims to design and build a prototype of an Automatic fabric roll edge extractor with the concept of engineering design thinking. The function of the device is to automate the removal process of adhesive tape without any manpower involved.

With the ever-growing demand for air cargo capacity comes the pursuit for cargo aircraft that combine a large payload with optimum efficiency. The Design, Build and Fly team set out to meet this challenge by creating a radio-controlled model airplane, to compete in the Payload Challenge organized by the British Model Flying Association (BMFA). The process involved careful research into aeronautical engineering theories and creative solutions. The effectiveness of the design was proved in test flights by two fully functional prototypes. Various issues were identified during the trials, carefully examined, and subsequently addressed in an iterative manner. The team has continuously implemented modifications to the design, in an effort to produce the model plane that would carry the target payload with the highest efficiency attainable, and the results will hopefully provide useful insights for future model builders and aircraft engineers alike.

Design, Build, Fly is a project for students to design and manufacture an airplane. Our team aims at producing a radio-controlled fixed-wing aircraft that conveys a predefined liquid payload in a flight circuit. This is to demonstrate its payload carrying capability with the lightest airframe. Through this project, students could apply technical and interpersonal skills to building an airplane with unconventional configurations.