The School of Engineering

Facilities and Resources

The School of Engineering is dedicated in providing a range of high-quality facilities and resources to support students' learning experiences. Lectures and tutorials for on-campus students normally take place in the School's lecture theatres and classrooms. Some courses may also be taught online using our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

Collaborating with our Library Liaison Officer, we regularly review the University Library stock and recommend books and journals to support students across all our courses. We also provide our students with 24/7 online access to the University Library’s vast electronic book, journal and database collections.

Computer Suites and associated software are regularly upgraded to reflect current industrial practice and developing course requirements, and extended opening hours are provided for the benefit of students. Remote access is available around the clock.

We have a range of cutting-edge laboratories underpinning the different subject areas and to support student projects:

The Advanced Composites and Polymers Laboratory

The Analogue Electronics and Control Engineering Laboratory

This laboratory has 24 fully equipped benches for analogue testing and measurements and 8 benches for control system design, analysis and development.

All benches have PCs with relevant software suites such as circuit simulations (Gesseca, Spice Age, Microcap) and control system simulations (ServoCad, Matlab).

Facilities also include, inverted pendulum kit, 6 Servoset systems, helicopter demonstration and development kits, and sets of walking robots.

Computer Aided Design and Rapid Prototyping Suites

The Computer and Network Laboratories

The School manages its own computer network, which is an autonomous network group. The network consists of a total of about 200 PCs running Linux and Windows. All the routing through the several owned subnets of the network is performed by Cisco and Netgear routers and switches.

The School runs its own servers for anything that the Network needs (DNS, DHCP, Kerberos, NIS etc). The network is a multiplatform transparent network, all computers can be accessed remotely for greater flexibility and use from home, with great care given to security, with sophisticated Firewalls and VPNs in place.

Throughout their courses, students learn and experiment with different networking technologies, as well as learning programming languages such as Java and C, and use a wide range of application packages, to enable learning in all areas of computer networks and communication systems.

The Digital Electronics and Microprocessor Laboratory

This laboratory has 45 fully equipped benches including scopes, network analysers, PCs and other standard electronic equipment for measurement purposes.

There are also hardware/software development tools for design, development and implementation of microcontroller systems. In addition, there are professional hardware/software programming/testing VHDL environments for CPLD and FPGAs devices.

The Digital Signal Processing Laboratory

The School's teaching of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is supported by both hardware and software laboratory facilities.

On the software side, MATLAB, an industry-standard simulation package, is available throughout our  Linux/Unix suites. It is used in teaching DSP, both in lectures and laboratory experiments, and is also available for DSP-related student projects.

There are also hardware DSP facilities in the School that are used for laboratory experiments and are also available for student projects.

The Energy Systems Laboratory

The Manufacturing Systems Laboratory

The Mechanical Behaviour of Materials Laboratory

The Metrology Laboratory

The Telecommunications Laboratory

Our facilities include a wide range of instruments for generating, receiving and analysing high-frequency signals. Signal generators and spectrum analysers cover the communication bands up to 22 GHz, with the emphasis being on the new 3G frequencies. We also have an anechoic chamber for the measurement of antennas.

Students throughout the degree courses work on a variety of laboratory experiments tailored to exploring the types of hardware and signals found in modern fixed and mobile communications.A recent addition to the facilities, are a range of electronic circuit boards that may be interconnected to form a number of typical communications systems.