Fast, small racing cars sped across the courtyard on Sonnenstrasse on Thursday, September 22, 2022. But that was just the visible part of an experience that seven budding engineers will remember for the rest of their educational and professional lives.
The Faculty of Mechanical Engineering's bridge course is a challenge that all mechanical engineering students in their first semester can take part in: With your team, build a vehicle with a drive system made from a bottle that can travel as far as possible under its own power.
The course began six weeks before the nimble bottles took to the track. For several hours each day before the actual start of the semester, the participants not only learned a lot about the motorless mobilization of modern mixed drinks containers, but also about many other things that play a role in the professional lives of engineers: Learning units on physics, mathematics and materials science, as well as teamwork and business administration.
For a holistic education
Business studies for engineers? Yes, of course, says Cindy Konen, research assistant at the faculty's Innovation Management department. "Many companies in Germany are managed by engineers." To do this, you need to be familiar with team leadership, for example. And with the "magic triangle" of time, quality and costs, which is used to define the product strategy. Konen: "Business studies is fundamental for this knowledge."
The day on which the prepared deposit containers whizz across the pavement as fast as an arrow crowns the bridge course with a formative practical experience. Here, it is not necessarily a question of achieving an immediate victory with a perfect design. It only gets really interesting when the occasionally quite daringly tuned vehicles suddenly show weaknesses in the practical test, while the professors stand by with interest.
This time, for example, it was the plastic guide tubes for the straightedge that melted due to the high friction, sticking to the cord and thus slowing down the bottle. The students replaced the components with steel tubes - problem solved. Inspired by the shiny components, the students spontaneously renamed their vehicle from "Ikarus One" to "Ikarus Silver Arrow One".
For life
"It's about pressure and how to deal with it," is how engineer Stephan Gottlieb puts it, and the way he says it, it's clear: this doesn't just apply to the pressure-powered dragsters, and it doesn't just apply to the participants of the bridge course, but it applies to life, it's a necessary part of the mindset of a person whose designs other people entrust their lives to.
"Ikarus Silver Arrow One" won the race with a distance covered of around 35 hard-fought meters. Its nameless rival was only a few meters behind. There was no difference in the fun written all over the faces of the two teams.
The lecturers involved in the mechanical engineering bridge course are Prof. Dr. Franz Vogler, Dr. Johannes Etzkorn, Prof. Dr. Yves Rosefort, Christine Jansing, Dr. Cindy Konen, Uwe Peters, Norbert Kluck and Stephan Gottlieb.