Scottish Branch Technical Meeting

Dr Tom Paterson, Scottish President and Prof Frank Cotton.

Report on the April Technical Meeting of Scottish Branch of ICME and AGM. This was a joint meeting with the Scottish Association for Metals.

The Members elected at the AGM were John Paterson as President, Tim Whittaker as Vice President and Ian Walker and Tom Gray onto Council.

Willie Howson reported in his Secretarial report that the seven Technical meetings were still attracting an excellent response with an average of 26 attending and the weekend conference and dance was also keeping numbers up.

Dr Tom Paterson went on to welcome the speaker Professor Frank Cotton, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Glasgow. Tom also welcomed the visitors from S.A.M.
Professor Cotton’s paper was titled “Research and Innovations in Engineering at the University of Glasgow”. He started by giving a brief history of the Engineering Faculty at Glasgow. This dates back to James Watt who in the 1760s, while working as a mathematical-instrument maker for the university, did some of his early work on the development of the steam engine. In 1840 Queen Victoria founded a chair in Civil Engineering and Mechanics, the first engineering chair in Great Britain. Professor Lewis Gordon was the first appointment in 1855. He was succeeded by another famous name, Macquorn Rankine, and he still held the chair in 1872 when the first B.Sc. was introduced for any appropriate degree of study, including engineering.
In 1923 the Faculty of Engineering was established and Honours degrees in engineering were introduced.
Today the University Engineering Faculty includes Aerospace, Mechanical, Electronic, Civil and Naval Engineering. He went on to give examples of some of the projects the department are and have been involved in. In Aero Mechanical they developed the Space Tethers for astronauts. They are working on helicopters for the military to reduce the noise vibration to prevent them being heard when flying at low altitude.
In Rehabilitation Engineering they are working on Spinal Cord Injury. By using electrical stimulation they can help a paralysed person to have movement. In the Materials area they work on Fracture Mechanics, Marine Adhesives and Bio-Materials to aid bone growth after a serious injury.
Professor Cotton covered a large variety of subjects and held the attention of the large turnout of attendees. This was shown by the questions and observations by the Members and visitors.
Dr John Wilcox representing The Scottish Association for Metals gave the vote of thanks to the Professor for his presentation.