Watch Again | IEEE WIE UKI Ambassadors’ Scheme Early Career Talk 2 – An Inspirational and Empowering Webinar for Women in Engineering

IEEE WIE in Engineering is an initiative with the goal to facilitate the recruitment and retention of women in technical disciplines globally. We envision a vibrant community of IEEE women and men collectively using their diverse talents to innovate for the benefit of humanity.

Early Career Talk aims to expose the participants to novel areas and aspects of engineering for solving real world problems. It also aims to establish a link for networking, mentorship and to create a connection for research opportunities.

Talk Topic:

With the growing concern over the impact of building sector on greenhouse gas emission, Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) was devised to evaluate how energy efficient a building is compared to its stock. They have now been mandatory for several years in the UK and other EPCs European countries. Without a doubt, the EPCs have contributed to improving the energy performance of the buildings, especially when there was no other scheme. However, growing evidence from different European countries suggest there might be doubts about their reliabilities due to uncertainties involved.

This talk focuses on some aspects of uncertainties in the UK non-domestic EPC scheme.

Speaker: Shiva Amirkhani, PhD candidate in Built Environment Studies, School of Computing and Engineering, University of West London

Shiva was born in Tehran, Iran, where she received both her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Architecture from University of Tehran. After working for several years as an architect and gaining experience in different residential and commercial projects, she started a course on Health, Wellbeing and Sustainable Buildings at UCL, where she learned about how the built environment can leave an impact on occupants’ comfort and wellbeing. Upon finishing her masters, she was awarded a studentship for a PhD at UWL. The research – a collaborative project with Hilton and Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) – is about the UK government’s recent legislation on EPC rating of commercial buildings. In her PhD, she is focused on hotel buildings. She is now in third year of her PhD and has disseminated her findings through the following:

Talk Topic:

Elasto-acoustic metamaterials are artificial constructions composed of fundamental building components and additional mechanical oscillators. The elasto-acoustic metamaterials have bandgaps at low frequencies where the wavelength is much larger than the structural unit dimensions owing to the resonance of oscillators. Most of the proposed metamaterials are periodic structures. Although periodic metamaterials can obtain good vibration attenuation within bandgap regions, the width of bandgaps is still narrow for practical applications.

The research proposes metamaterial beams with rainbow-shaped resonators that aim at enlarging local resonance bandgaps. The proposed metamaterial beams include linearly varying or sinusoidally varying cantilever mass resonator attached to the host beams. Frequency response functions (FRFs) of the rainbow metamaterials are estimated by a mathematical model concerning the dynamics of cantilever-mass structures and transfer matrix between segments of the rainbow metamaterials. Results show that rainbow-shaped resonators can introduce inertial forces inside wider frequency range when compared to the periodic resonators, hence broader bandgaps, the FRFs of the metamaterial beams also change with the rainbow distributions of resonators. An optimization scheme is thus developed based on the proposed mathematical model to search for the rainbow distributions that could maximize the vibration attenuation within targeted single or multiple frequency ranges.

Speaker: Han Meng, Academia Senior lecturer in the Department of Mechanical and Construction Engineering, Northumbria University

Han Meng is a senior lecturer in the Department of Mechanical and Construction Engineering at Northumbria University. She holds PhD degrees in Acoustics and Mechanics from both Ecole Centrale de Lyon (France) and Xi’an Jiaotong University (China), and a BEng (Hons) degree in Mechanical Engineering from Xi’an Jiao Tong University (China).

Prior to joining Northumbria University, she was a Marie-Curie researcher at the University of Nottingham.

Talk Topic:

Smile or “Self-controlled Mobile Intelligent Low-cost ECG” is the main platform developed during the PhD thesis of Dr. Lakhdari. It combines an interesting number of the latest technologies of “Artificial Intelligence (AI)”, mobile applications and systems.

Smile is composed of a novel mobile prototype of the ECG device and two mobile applications, for patients and healthcare professionals. It combines the creativity of the patient-centered design approach, the high accuracy of the ECG data analysis, and the real time medical interactions.

The easiness, the security, the adaptability, the accessibility and the adoption of Smile represent a high level medical intelligent assistance for chronic patients and an example of good practices using the current possibilities of technology to enhance the Quality of Life of chronic patients.

Speaker: Kheira Lakhdari, Academia Researcher in the domain of Telecommunication Systems and Networks, Intelligent Systems, Digital and Mobile Health

Dr Lakhdari received her PhD in Telecommunication Systems and Networks from Abou Bekr Belkaid University, Tlemcen, Algeria, in 2020. Her thesis was entitled ‘Conception and Development of a Mobile Intelligent Assistant for the Monitoring of Chronic Diseases’. Dr. Lakhdari is a part-time lecturer at Belhadj Bouchaib University, Ain Temouchent, Algeria.

She is a member of the research laboratory “STIC” (Systems and Technologies of Information and Communication), Tlemcen, Algeria. Her research interests include Wireless Networks, IoMT, Intelligent Systems, Could Computing, Quantum Computing, mobile applications and services, with a focus on health and education as application sectors.

Talk Topic:

Sustainable design in biomedical applications seeks to reduce negative impacts on the environment. One of the main area to use light weight structure which can handle requirement of the particular application.

Biomedical design is one of the main application that researchers are trying to apply sustainability by reducing the material used in design. In recent years new structures have been developed for sustainability as they are lighter, with less material usage while sustaining their mechanical properties to be utilised in the application. One of these structures is a corrugated structure mainly used in the packaging industry but recently has been recognised by many other applications as the structure is known for its capabilities against shock absorption.

In this study, BS6655 was used to evaluate corrugated structure in a helmet while an impact occurs to its front. The dynamic responses of the corrugated helmet were compared with a solid helmet. The results showed that the corrugated helmet has a higher ability to absorb the shock and protect the head from injuries in such impact.

Speaker: Mahshid Yazdi Far, Lecturer in mechanical design, Coventry University School of Mechanical Automotive and Aerospace (MAA)

Dr Mahshid Yazdi Far is currently a Lecturer in Engineering design, Material and Solid Mechanics at School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Automotive Engineering at Coventry University. She studied Biomedical engineering at Brunel University London and received her doctoral degree in September 2014. She received her Master degree in September 2010 in Biomedical engineering at Brunel University London. She completed her Bachelor degree in Material engineering from IKIU University in 2008.

In the meanwhile, she worked as a part-time Lecturer Assistant at Brunel University for 4 years during her PhD. She then moved to Birmingham City University as a research fellow to optimise structural design and material database of natural composite. She then continued her professional career as a manager of research and development at Nicklin before she joined Coventry University in 2018.