Agricultural Engineering Centre
The Harper Adams Engineering Department plans to add to its existing teaching and laboratory facilities to provide urgently needed, up-to-date specialist facilities for teaching and research in agricultural and off-road engineering. A new building is now required to support our continued growth in engineering provision.
The main engineering workshop and laboratories at Harper Adams have been developed and expanded alongside buildings first erected in the 1950's. Now, however, we are the only UK Higher Education provider of honours degree Agricultural Engineering courses. The growth of our engineering courses as well as our expanding research programme has left the department with accommodation in much need of modernisation. The existing buildings are proving inadequate for the needs of an annual intake of 80 undergraduate and 15 postgraduate research students so it is proposed to provide a new building to house a modern University Engineering Centre.
The new engineering building will provide 'clean' engineering facilities, including an electronics/mechatronics lab, a hydraulics lab, research labs for tractors/field machines and precision farming, new office accommodation for academic staff and specialist teaching facilities.
What I liked most about Harper was that students get involved with realistic practical experiments. Harper's links to industry are so good that it's rare for a week to go by without a new piece of machinery turning up for demonstration and teaching purposes. In 2009, I was offered the chance to return to Harper Adams to study for a PhD, which I jumped at! My research is centred on the improvement of tractor efficiency. The project is funded by The Douglas Bomford Trust and now has also received support from AGCO with the loan of a Massey Ferguson 8480.
James Ward
The existing workshops will then be available for use as an extended manufacturing facility, a soil bin laboratory, an engine test cell, upgraded off road traction and sprayer areas and wind tunnel facilities. Your gift will help to provide facilities for students such as James Ward, who graduated in 2003 with a BEng (Hons) in Agricultural Engineering.
