A selection of past and ongoing projects, including outreach rigs, experimental systems, and bio-inspired robotics. Please feel free to email me to discuss your requirements.
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The human-powered hydrofoil bike project at Imperial College London was ran for several years as part of the third-year Design Make and Test (DMT) group design module, where students work in small teams to tackle open-ended engineering challenges. In this course, which accounts for a significant por…
Dates: October 2023 - June 2024 | Commissioner: Marc Masen, David Nowell
This project focuses on developing a novel marine sampling system that integrates environmental DNA (eDNA) collection with biologging technology to study predator–prey interactions in the deep sea. The overarching aim is to capture real-time evidence of how whales interact with their prey, an ecolog…
Dates: May 2025 - March 2026 | Commissioner: Harry Hosker, Design Fellow & Scientific Associate, Natural History Museum
A realistic sea turtle robot designed for validation of plesiosaur swimming experiments.
Shelly is a lifelike sea turtle robot built to validate Dr Luke Muscutt’s experiments on plesiosaur swimming. Because plesiosaurs are extinct, we can’t directly observe their motion or measure their performance in the water—so the research needs a living benchmark. Sea turtles are one of the few ani…
Dates: October 2024 - June 2025 | Commissioner: Marc Masen, Imperial College London
A unique facility for isolating, measuring, and understanding how vibrations travel through aircraft engine structures.
Hermes—the Helicopter Excitation and Measurement System—is a unique experimental facility in the Structural Dynamics Lab at Imperial College London, created to understand how vibrations move through jet engine structures. Funded by Rolls-Royce, Hermes focuses on the structural behaviour of engines: …
A hybrid mechanical instrument where punched paper, precision motors, and digital control bring visible motion and acoustic sound into perfect time with human performers.
The music box is a finely crafted mechanical instrument that transforms physical motion into sound. At its heart, tuned metal tines are set into vibration as a patterned score passes through the mechanism, each note triggered by direct physical contact rather than digital playback. A stepper motor a…
Demonstration rig designed for lectures and outreach
This outreach demonstration is designed to illustrate the different resonant vibration modes of an aircraft’s wings in a clear and engaging way. It uses a simplified scale model of an A380 aircraft, cut from durable polycarbonate to ensure robustness during repeated demonstrations. The model is vib…
Simple demonstration rig designed for lectures and outreach
This vibration demonstrator consists of a carriage suspended from a spring and guided vertically by precision linear rails, allowing smooth, repeatable motion in a single direction. The open and robust layout is intentionally designed so that the main elements of the system—the spring, carriage, rai…
The world's most scientifically-accurate plesiosaur robot.
Flip the plesiosaur robot was designed as a continuation of my research at Southampton, building on earlier concepts while moving toward a more accurate and realistic robotic platform. The project aimed to translate theoretical and experimental research into a physical system that more closely repre…
A four-axis gantry-mounted motion control system capable of flapping two flippers in a recirculating flume tank while measuring the hydrodynamic forces.
My doctoral research at the University of Southampton required a custom-built system that could flap two flippers in a recirculating flume tank while recording forces on the flippers and capturing flow visualisation. The control system was written in LabVIEW and was run on a National Instruments…
Dates: 2012-2017 | Commissioner: EPSRC,NERC, Ginko Investments
An outreach rig to show the concept of resonance and constructive and destructive wave interference.
This outreach rig is built around a classic Rubens tube, transforming invisible sound waves into a vivid, unforgettable display. The system consists of a long, sealed metal tube perforated with evenly spaced holes along its length and fed by a regulated gas supply.
Commissioner: Angie Wright: Southampton clean energy
