Graduating Mechanical Engineering Students Reflect on their Experience at CERN

The University of Dundee is part of the CMS Collaboration at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

Our involvement is based around expertise in materials engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, and computing. This means our students not only benefit from learning from these expertise but, some also have an opportunity to visit.

“The project involved detecting signs of failure in cooling fans in order to predict when maintenance would be required. I had a contact at CERN who provided me with a background to the problem and they also were there to answer any questions I had.”

“Part of my project included a visit to the CERN site in Geneva. I was fortunate enough to see the CMS detector when it was separated for maintenance, a sight that few outsiders get to see in the flesh, and it was even more impressive than I had imagined.”

Professor Robert Keatch, Head of Engineering at the School of Science and Engineering, has been coordinating projects for undergraduate students in partnership with CMS since the collaboration started in 2018.

The University of Dundee is engaged with CERN on a number of other projects, notably through work led by Professor Amin Abdolvand, Chair of Functional Materials & Photonics.

The development of new processes and technologies could impact on the next major upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the so-called High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, which aims to increase the potential for discoveries after 2025, unlocking more of science’s greatest mysteries going back to the ‘Big Bang.’

Interested in Mechanical Engineering? Have a look at our course page.