Mini Tour of Uni and Beyond

We started off Tuesday by meeting Darran, Ever, and Stephen in the lab to discuss a plan for the work we will be doing. Two English students who are studying sports engineering will be working with us on our two projects: The adhesives and the tribology and characterization of Ultra-High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMWPE) aka snowboard base material.

<---Clock tower at Uni. Perigrine Falcons live in the top and patrol the skies for pigeons.

Seal of the University of Birmingham--->

We then walked through campus and went to take a ride on the University of Birmingham's Hydrogen-Powered Canal Boat.

It is the first hydrogen powered canal boat ("Narrow Boat" in the UK). It uses a small electric engine as well so I guess technically speaking it would be hybrid of sorts. One of the main drawbacks of hydrogen is its safe storage...i.e. keeping high pressure vessels filled with pure hydrogen in a moving vehicle might cause some complaint from transportation authorities. The way this canal boat gets around this issue is to store the hydrogen in a metallic compound which is placed inside the individual hydrogen fuel cells.

<---Our tour guide holding an internal cell of a larger fuel cell

Metallic Compound for Hydrogen storage--->

This boat uses two fuel cells a 1kW and a 5kW, which are air-cooled and water-cooled respectively. The two cells work in tandem; the 1kW cell is endothermic and the 5kW cell is exothermic. Thus the heat produced by the larger cell can then be exchanged to the smaller and the excess to the water in the canal.

Some grafitti on the canal--->

We then set off in Darran's rental car (oddly enough a chevy made in korea) to Stratford-on-Avon.

<---Korean-made miniature Chevy Aveo

In case you were wondering, I was, the gears and pedals are all in the same orientation.

Stratford is a older town, fairly small, and happens to be the home of Billy Shakespeare. It was a pretty laid back town with many waterways and cafes. I tasted Dr. Barbero's Cornish Creme Tea which is apparently a cup of tea with two scones and some cornish creme. A scone in the UK is pronounce "scahn" and is way better than any scahn from Panera.

<---Bridge over Avon river

<---A cathedral in Stratford

We saw Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale", which was a bit long (over 3 hours) and was very hard to understand at first, but your mind gets accustomed to the language quite quickly.

Covert ops inside the Shakespeare Theatre --->

We kept on driving to London Heathrow to stay in a hotel for the night, as Darran and Ever were both leaving for the states this morning. Our GPS wasn't working great and it took us a while but we made it.

I don't know if i've talked about this yet but EVERYTHING is more expensive here and hotels included. The hotel room had a queen bed and a single bed and was of similar quality to a Super 8 in the states, yet it cost 80 pounds per night which is roughly $150. Ouch. It had Wifi for the cheap price of 12 pounds and breakfast for 8. Went to sleep around 1:30am....with a big day ahead.