The Big Bang Fair was attended by nearly 5,000 pupils from schools around the UK and over 1,500 teachers, politicians, exhibitors and sponsors. It was one of the most important events in the science and engineering calendar. The Fair was held at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference centre from the 4-6 March 2009 and featured many different stands and presentations from all aspects of the science and engineering world. BLOODHOUND SSC’s involvement took the form of a presentation to about 150 school pupils by Richard Noble and three workshop sessions delivered by aerodynamicists Ron Ayers and Ben Evans, plus of course the model and display that was present throughout.
Richard was his usual excellent, exhilarating and informative self, but he did admit to feeling slightly daunted at seeing an audience made up mostly of female school pupils! He outlined his own world land speed record attempt in 1983 with Thrust 2 which brought the record back to Britain and then explained how the team overcame the engineering challenges to design a machine capable of 633 mph. He then went on to describe how Andy Green beat that record with Thrust SSC in 1997 and also became the first car to break the sound barrier. He explained to the pupils just how difficult aerodynamically it is to get a car to do this. Richard finished with an update on the BLOODHOUND SSC project, which has been designed to go even faster than Thrust SSC, at 1,000 mph, and invited the schools to get involved with the programme.
The workshops that Ron Ayers (above) and Ben Evans (left) delivered were met with widespread appreciation. They consisted of an insight into what it takes to become an aerodynamicist and how you use CFD (computational fluid dynamics) to solve the complex aerodynamic challenges that are faced by the BLOODHOUND design team and on other projects such as aircraft, missiles and rockets. The sessions generated fantastic questions from the pupils and showed that maths can be really exciting and relevant when related to an iconic engineering project.
Overall, the event was deemed a great success and the BLOODHOUND team were very pleased to have attended such a high profile event and are looking forward to taking the show car to next year’s Big Bang Fair in Manchester.
