Project work

Our degrees are designed with professional skills training (including ethics and sustainable innovation) embedded throughout all years to prepare you for the next step in your career. 

Each year you will complete a range of projects requiring you to work both in teams and individually. These projects are structured to help you develop your project management and problem-solving skills, to become an effective communicator, and to make you a more well-rounded engineer by working inclusively and effectively with others of varying experience and backgrounds.   

Year 1

In Year 1 there will be group projects both where you develop your group working skills alongside your literature searching, in addition to a project using software tools to identify the best material for a specific role in a given design (e.g. for a wind turbine blade, carbon composite break pads or a photo-bioreactor). 

Year 2 

You’ll begin to apply all your core materials engineering skills to a materials synthesis and characterisation project, where working in a team you will develop a processing route and testing protocol to produce an industrially important material such as a semiconducting photovoltaic device, a paint pigment or a jet engine turbine blade. 

Year 3 

Your third year project is your capstone module in design. Here you become a practicing materials engineer, working in a team to undertake a new or alternative materials design. Your team will be mentored by consultants who you will meet weekly to report on progress against the various aspects of the design progress.  We will also include a site visit in Year 3 to ensure that you see how materials engineering is applied in the real world. 

Year 4 (Integrated Masters) – Research Project

As part of your advanced training, you’ll complete an individual research project which will be supervised by one of our materials academics. You will be integrated into their research group and work in the leading research facilities of any of the Schools of Chemical and Process Engineering, Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, and the Bragg Centre for Materials Research. 

You’ll have the option to develop your own research project with an academic, giving you the opportunity to decide on the skills you want to develop for the next step in your career with the option of working on hard or soft materials. Moreover, through the diverse range of projects offered, you’ll be able to develop either your experimental, computational or theory-based skills, with the added possibility of working on a project in collaboration with industry.  We have run projects on everything from running shoes, pharmaceutical formulations to polymer colloids and nanocrystalline metals.