UC students win Australasian mechanical engineering contest

‘All Blacks of engineering’ - UC students win Australasian mechanical engineering contest

A team of three University of Canterbury mechanical engineering students has won the prestigious international Warman Design & Build Competition held in Sydney last week, competing against thousands of students.

The 30-year-old contest involves a challenging project to design and make a machine to perform a difficult task, with the hardworking UC students using mechanical gear, 3D printing, robotics and autonomous vehicles to achieve their win.

In the New Zealand leg of the competition, the UC Engineering team of Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) students – captain Arianna Ryan, David Cleary and Jamie Sommer – beat 32 local teams to go to the finals in Sydney last week where they triumphed against 17 teams from around Australasia.

Their supervising academic Dr Don Clucas says he was proud of how well the dedicated UC students did, beating 2000 other students from the Asia-Pacific region’s top universities.

“The UC team put in a massive amount of work to achieve this and were excellent ambassadors for our Department, College and University,” Dr Clucas says.

“These guys are our elite sportsperson equivalents – the All Blacks of engineering! It reinforces the fact that that the University of Canterbury is a world-class leader in engineering.”

UC Engineering students have competed in the Warman competition 26 times and are ranked #2 for prizes won over past three decades.

This year it was estimated more than 2000 first professional mechanical engineering students from Australia, New Zealand, China and Malaysia competed.

The competition is open to mechanical engineering students in their first design analysis course from across the Asia-Pacific region, with the majority from Australia and New Zealand. Heats are held at each participating university as part of design engineering courses, typically in the second year of study. The winning team from the heats at each university then converge on the final in Sydney to determine exactly who the region’s best budding engineering designers are.

The UC students won a fully paid trip to Sydney and a $3000 prize sponsored by Weir Warman and Engineers Australia.

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