Summer Placement: Caterva

Sarunas Nejus has been working at Caterva GmbH  in Germany this summer as an Energy Storage Systems Hardware Engineer. He tells us what he's been up to.

"I am responsible for the hardware of solar energy storage systems, which, apart from the conventional features they have (energy for household users etc.), being connected to a swam, provide/sink charge to/from the grid in Europe when it is needed (for instance, sudden shut off of a power plant). That is called frequency stabilisation and our systems do it in quite a novel way, thus it’s very exciting to work here. One of the things that attracted me here was that the company is a start-up (you know how things are going in start-ups, don’t you?).

Summer Placement: ARM

Eddie is studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering. His summer placement was with ARM working within the Systems and Software Group.

Studying Electronic Engineering, I’d heard a lot about ARM, a semiconductor and software design company, designing the IP which goes into 95% of smartphones, 80% of digital cameras, and 35% of all electronic devices. Recently described in an article as an “invisible brand”, given that most consumers of these products may not have ever heard of the company, my summer internship was always going to be a bit of a voyage of discovery!

At the time of writing, I’ve only got a few weeks left of the summer placement and have been very fortunate to have been given access to some amazing resources and guidance from industry leading engineers. The experience I have gained from the various projects I’ve been working on in my role within the Systems and Software Group has been invaluable, giving me the opportunity to learn various new programming languages and top of the range industrial software with a market leader in their industry.

Summer Placement: Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Sheffield

Jordan Rickard has been working with the department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University  on a research project about new processing techniques to improve the performance of high efficiency NiFe batteries. He tells us what he's been up to:

So far I have been using a new processing technique to manufacture iron electrodes for use in Nickle-Iron batteries. I start the day by preparing the chemicals needed to coat the iron electrode, then using a press that operates at 120°c and 10 tonnes of pressure I fix the mixture to some nickel plates. These can then be placed in a solution with another electrode and connected to a machine that charges and discharges the newly created battery.