TEAM CASCADE Impress Rolls Royce: February 2021

Team Cascade (Mridhula, Arzina and Ananya, all in year 13) were winners in the 2020 School’s Aerospace Challenge, and this was reported in Kendrick news in October 2020 when they were presented with their prize.

After reading about Team Cascade’s success, a parent who works for Rolls Royce got in touch and the Team were invited to present their project and connect with Rolls Royce engineers.

This took place during the February half term week.

They were introduced to some of the amazing women engineers working on the kind of projects they had considered in their competition design. They met the leader of the Rolls Royce project on megawatt propulsion who designed a real system like  the Team Cascade design, linking a gas turbine to a megawatt electrical machine to generate power.  They also met the leader of Rolls Royce work on sustainable aviation fuel, which also tied into Team cascade’s study on the uses of biofuel.  The leader of the engagement programme was also present and gave details on early careers with Rolls-Royce.

They then made a presentation of their project, which they had updated by incorporating extra design ideas taking their initial work to a deeper level.

Team Cascade were a credit to Kendrick School – they were told they had shown passion and enthusiasm for the subject matter, and that their project submission had pointed things out that Start-ups with £100million funding do not always make. They were told their Presentation was excellent, as was the quality of their thinking, and team work.

Team Cascade (Mridhula, Arzina and Ananya) have all applied for Engineering courses at University, and asked some keen questions to the engineers. They were very grateful for the opportunity offered to meet role models of women engineers working in a world class industry.

Here is some feedback from the team.

We had a fantastic experience in presenting our project to the Rolls Royce engineers and learnt a lot from the work that they have been doing to improve the environmental impact of aircraft. The meeting gave us insight on how our research and design are actually quite similar to the innovations currently happening in the industry, and we also understood some areas of our design that we could develop further to optimise it. It was inspiring to hear about their research and makes us all very excited for our next steps in the industry as we continue on to university and careers.