3D video tours of various labs in the Engineering Science Department, University of Oxford

Project and design work forms a major part of the Engineering courses. The Design, Build & Test Lab is home to a range of equipment which gives you the opportunity to get hands-on experience with projects to test and develop your engineering knowledge. The workshop is equipped with manual milling machines and lathe, sheet metal cutting and folding, spot welders, pillar drills and hand tools. In your first year you are likely to use the DBT Lab to build and test a Truss Bridge from riveted aluminium alloy extrusion, with the best constructions typically weighing less than 700g. Once completed, you will use a hydraulic pump in front of your classmates to test the bridge until it buckles. You would usually also complete a simple turning exercise on one of the 6 student lathes. Later in your second year you may use the workshop to test your fabrication skills by making a toolbox, or you might construct walking robots using the CNC router.

The 3D Printing Lab is our newest lab (opened: 2019) and provides staff and students with a dedicated space to produce physical prototypes of their engineering design projects. There is a wide range of different equipment available for use in the Lab allowing print resolutions down to 15 microns over areas up to 900cm².

This Lab is used across the whole undergraduate course to help you visualise your designs as a 3D model before you build the full scale model in another Lab. For example, as a first year student you are likely to design a bridge as part of your practical mechanical lab. However, before you construct it out of aluminium, you are able to print your CAD design in order to test a small-scale model of your bridge.

In the first year, you usually have the opportunity to design, build and test a music box and then later in your second year you may get the opportunity to learn about printed circuit board design, programming Field Programmable Gate Arrays and analogue filter design. This space is also open to you in your fourth year when you are undertaking research for your individual research project.

The Electrical Lab also has a printed circuit board milling machine which allows you to manufacture your own circuit boards in-house!

A wide variety of teaching and research activities takes place in the Materials Lab with undergraduates, postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers all using the space. The equipment in this Lab is used for testing materials in many ways. From the first stages of processing and looking at the microstructure, to analysing the properties of the material under different environmental conditions. As an undergraduate you are likely to have several practical labs in the Materials Lab where you will test the theory of material behaviours taught in your lectures. For example, in your first year you might complete a buckling experiment, testing how a beam bends to understand its properties. Or use the Impact Testing Machine to see how much energy is needed to break different materials.

The Fluids Lab at Oxford is home to 3 flumes, 2 wind tunnels, a Pelton wheel turbine, a Francis turbine and 3 Hilton refrigeration rigs. As a student, you will get the opportunity to use most of this equipment to test and confirm theory that you learn about in your lectures.

In one of your second year labs you might explore the fluid mechanics involved in the air flow over a model cylinders and aerofoils while looking at the energy flow and conservation in thermos-fluid processes. Later on in your studies you might be in this Lab looking at the flow of water under a sluice gate, along with the associated hydraulic jump, or evaluating the efficiency of the turbines at different blade angles as part of your coursework.

The Chemical Lab is a space dedicated to studying the concepts of Chemical Engineering. After studying the core principles of engineering in your first and second years, you may choose to specialise in this area and so a lot of your practical lab sessions would take place in the Chemical Lab.

Here you might study the mechanics behind chemical processes used in larger engineering projects, or study the engineering behind the chemicals used in food and drink manufacture.

The Control Lab is a flexible teaching space where you are able to explore different aspects of control theory by designing and testing specialised control devices. This area of engineering is introduced in the second year and is all about getting hardware to behave in a certain way. Most people have seen a Segway – this is able to stay upright due to some clever mathematical modelling and a bit of computer programming. You may get the option to design the systems behind a Segway, to get a Lego robot to play football!

To complement what you learn in lectures, you get hands on experience in this lab designing a controller to allow a helicopter to hover. In this lab you will also find another Structures second year experiment - looking at how a building responds to an earthquake using the “shaky building” equipment.

The Energy Lab is a flexible teaching space home to a wide variety of undergraduate practical teaching labs. Although this room is called the Energy laboratory, it is only used for this purpose in Hilary (spring) term. At that time, the room is full of electrical machines and heat transfer experiments. Earlier in the year, in Michaelmas (autumn) term, this is the location of the Communications Lab, where you could experiment with transmission lines and modulation. In Trinity (summer) term, the lab is transformed into the Robotics Lab where you could be trying to program a line-following robot to follow complicated patterns laid out on the floor!

Computing is a major part of modern engineering and, because of this, you will be introduced to a range of professional engineering software packages whilst you are a student here. You are not expected to have any experience with programming when you start the course and so will be taught everything you need to know in one of our dedicated Software Labs.

The Student Study Area is located at the top of the Thom Building and provides arguably some of the best views of the city of Oxford and the surrounding area. In this room there are individual study desks, larger group study tables and small meeting rooms all with dedicated power sockets which you are able to use during the academic term, whenever the building is open. Students in all stages of their academic careers come to this quiet space to study, complete problem sheets, revise for exams, and work on their research projects.

The Heat Engines Lab is a large lab space dedicated to looking at the mechanics of engines and combustion research. Here there are two Daimler Smart engines (0.7 litre, four stroke, spark ignition) hooked up to computers which allow you to measure the input and outputs of the engines as they run. In your first year, you are likely to do an exercise to understand instrument accuracy and calibration, and engine power and efficiency for a range of operating conditions using the Daimler Smart engines.

Throughout your degree you will be taught through a mixture of lectures and practical lab work. Your first and second year lectures are likely to take place in our large lecture theatres on the first floor of the Thom Building. Here you will sit with the rest of your year and learn about the core topics that form the basis of almost all engineering, such as mathematics, electronics, electromagnetism,  communications, structures and mechanics and thermodynamics. Find out what these lectures are like by checking out our taster lectures.